<![CDATA[The increasing need for trustworthy digital document verification presents challenges in ensuring authenticity, transparency, and tamper resistance without relying on centralized authorities. This study aims to develop and evaluate a decentralized document notarization system using Ethereum and IPFS that offers secure, transparent, and cost-efficient verification. The system employs modular smart contracts deployed through a factory pattern to create user-specific verifier instances, enabling document submission, revocation, and verification using keccak-256 hashes, ECDSA signatures, and IPFS content identifiers. Methods include contract development, deployment on a local Hardhat network, performance benchmarking, and front-end integration for user interaction. Results show that verifier deployment consumes approximately 1.19 million gas (≈$85 at 20 gwei), document submission around 85 thousand gas (≈$6), and revocation about 50 thousand gas (≈$3.50). Client-side operations such as hashing and IPFS pinning occur in under 50 milliseconds, while real-world blockchain confirmations take 10–30 seconds. The findings demonstrate that decentralized notarization using Ethereum and IPFS is both technically feasible and economically viable. Future enhancements, including Layer 2 rollups, batch notarization, and privacy-preserving features such as encrypted IPFS pinning or zero-knowledge proofs, are proposed to further improve scalability, cost-efficiency, and data confidentiality]]>
