A personal credit management scheme for consortium blockchains integrating smart contracts and light node mechanisms

The increasing demand for trustworthy and privacy-preserving credit reporting systems has exposed the limitations of both centralized and existing blockchain-based solutions, including scalability bottlenecks, weak privacy protection, and insufficient incentive mechanisms. To address these challenges, we propose LightCred, a novel consortium blockchain-based personal credit management framework that integrates lightweight nodes, Merkle proofs, multi-role smart contracts, and privacy-preserving cryptographic techniques. LightCred features a five-layer architecture that efficiently collects, verifies, stores, and serves credit data while ensuring data integrity, confidentiality, and regulatory compliance. Specifically, it (i) employs a low-cost and traceable data reduction mechanism through lightweight nodes and Merkle proofs to minimize storage and improve verifiability; (ii) introduces a multi-role smart contract model that enforces dynamic access control and fair incentive distribution based on participant reputations; and (iii) integrates zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption to support privacy-preserving credit scoring and querying. Experimental results demonstrate that LightCred achieves superior performance compared to five baseline methods, delivering up to 5% higher throughput, 3–5% lower privacy leakage, and 10–15% reduced storage costs, while maintaining competitive latency and auditability. These findings validate LightCred as a robust, scalable, and privacy-aware credit management solution, offering a viable alternative for modern credit reporting systems.