Secure Civic Fund Allocation Using Blockchain-Based Blind Approval Workflow

This paper presented Secure Civic Fund Allocation, a blockchain-based municipal fund management platform that advances the state-of-the-art through three novel contributions: (1) a keccak256-based blind approval mechanism that conceals contractor identity from reviewing authorities; (2) a five-document IPFS evidence anchoring protocol that creates a tamper-evident physical proof chain; and (3) a three-contract Solidity architecture that enforces fund release exclusively through verified on-chain state transitions. Deployment on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet demonstrated a total per-project gas cost of 486,600 units ($0.0148 at current prices), confirming practical deployability at municipal scale. The system achieves complete immutability, public auditability via Etherscan, and real-time citizen monitoring without any trusted intermediary. CivicChain directly addresses the three fundamental failure modes of existing municipal fund systems: opacity (solved by public event logs), collusion (solved by blind approval routing), and document fabrication (solved by IPFS content addressing). The platform's architecture is generalizable to NGO grant management, agricultural subsidy distribution, and disaster relief fund allocation.

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