Blockchain-based secure tender management system: a smart contract framework for transparent and fair E-procurement

Abstract

Public and private sector tendering has traditionally relied on manual, paper-based, or loosely digitized workflows that are slow, opaque, and vulnerable to favouritism, record tampering, and unauthorized disclosure of bid information. Conventional e-tendering portals, although faster than paper-based processes, remain centralized, exposing them to a single point of failure and not guaranteeing that evaluation outcomes are auditable by bidders themselves. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Blockchain-Based Secure Tender Management System that uses Ethereum smart contracts, the Inter Planetary File System for decentralized document storage, and MetaMask-based identity/wallet management to automate tender publication, bid submission, evaluation, and contract award. The system is organized around two core smart contracts — a Listings Contract that manages tender creation, publication, and bidder communication, and an Agreement Producer Contract that manages award, billing, and payment logic — deployed and tested using Truffle and Ganache. By anchoring every transaction to an immutable, cryptographically verifiable ledger, the proposed framework removes intermediaries, enforces evaluation rules programmatically, and gives every stakeholder a synchronized, tamper-evident view of the tendering lifecycle. A review of blockchain-enabled procurement, construction-industry payment automation, and decentralized storage literature from 2020–2026 is used to contextualize the design choices and to identify open research directions, including scalability, gas-cost optimization, regulatory compliance, and integration with artificial intelligence for bid evaluation.