ScholarMark, Pakistan’s first artificial intelligence and blockchain-powered research integrity platform developed by DecentraSec, has completed its first official institutional demonstration at the Office of Research, Innovation, and Commercialization at Mehran University of Engineering and Technology in Jamshoro. The demonstration, chaired by Professor Dr Sheeraz Memon, Director of ORIC at MUET, brought together distinguished faculty members including Professor Dr Zeeshan Khatri, Professor Dr Awais Khatri, Dr Sanam Narejo, Dr Raheel Bawani, and Dr Adnan Ashraf Arain for a session in which DecentraSec’s leadership, led by Chief Executive Officer Fahad Ghouri, presented the platform’s capabilities and its potential to transform how Pakistan’s higher education institutions manage and verify research integrity.
ScholarMark is being developed within the ecosystem of NIC Hyderabad, supported by Ignite, the National Technology Fund under the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, alongside partners LMKT and PTCL. Its positioning as Pakistan’s first next-generation research integrity platform reflects the genuine gap it is attempting to fill within the country’s academic and research infrastructure. Research integrity, encompassing the detection and prevention of plagiarism, data fabrication, unauthorised authorship, and the broader question of how original discoveries are attributed and protected, is a challenge that Pakistan’s universities have historically managed through conventional tools and manual processes that are increasingly inadequate as research output grows and the methods used to manipulate it become more sophisticated. ScholarMark’s combination of artificial intelligence auditing and blockchain-based Proof of Discovery addresses that gap with a technology stack that is both more capable and more tamper-resistant than existing approaches.
The Proof of Discovery mechanism is one of the more technically significant aspects of what ScholarMark offers. By creating an immutable blockchain record of when a research finding was established and by whom, the platform provides a verifiable and independently auditable trail of intellectual ownership that protects researchers against disputes over priority and attribution. This function carries particular importance in Pakistan’s academic context, where the pressure to publish and the competition for research recognition have sometimes created incentives that existing integrity mechanisms cannot adequately check. The AI audit component complements this by providing automated analysis of research submissions that can identify integrity concerns at a scale and speed that human reviewers cannot match, flagging issues for expert review rather than attempting to replace academic judgement entirely.
The institutional demonstration at ORIC MUET is a significant milestone for a startup at ScholarMark’s stage, as ORICs are precisely the institutional stakeholders whose adoption is most consequential for a platform of this kind. An ORIC that integrates ScholarMark into its research management workflow becomes both a validation of the platform’s capability and a reference implementation that other universities can observe and evaluate. The session also included an announcement of internship and future recruitment opportunities for MUET students, reflecting DecentraSec’s intent to build a talent pipeline from within the university ecosystem it is working to serve, a move that benefits both the company and the students it recruits by creating a direct link between the platform’s development and the academic community whose research it is designed to protect. The demonstration marks an early but concrete step in ScholarMark’s ambition to become the infrastructure layer for research integrity across Pakistan’s higher education system.
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