The IOTA Foundation is one of seven enterprises chosen to support the early-stage innovation of designing a European distributed ledger technology platform.
The goal of the initiative is to improve the efficiency and accountability of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI), a network of nodes dedicated to facilitating the efficiency of EU-centric transactions, as well as the expansion of the region’s supply chain through the adoption of emerging technologies, all while lowering the European carbon footprint.
The EBSI will be supported by the Iota Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports the Tangle, an open-source DLT platform, in cross-border relations between governments, businesses, and citizens for “digital management of educational credentials, the establishment of trusted digital audit trails and document traceability, SME financing, data sharing among authorities, and digital identification.”
The European Commission, which has jurisdiction over the 27-member EU, will oversee the blockchain network’s nodes, while individual members of the European Blockchain Partnership will manage nodes in their respective regions.
During the tendering process for the pre-commercial procurement in November 2020, the Iota foundation was one of 30 blockchain/DLT focused projects that submitted an official application.
Following EBSI approval, the project will move on with a two-year pilot plan in which a total of 6.2 million euros will be distributed to the seven applications through a number of elimination steps. Only two projects will compete in the final round after a year of rigorous testing across a number of applications.
This will be a “12-month phase of testing the capabilities of the newly constructed infrastructure and apps (e.g. digital product passport, IPR management scenarios).”
If all phases are completed successfully throughout the two-year timeframe, the project will be awarded a service charge of 1.6 million euros and selected as the single project to implement the European Commission’s DLT infrastructure.
In other Iota developments, in October 2020, Iota Foundation partnered with the Japanese government on an artificial intelligence and DLT crossover project aimed at anticipating the risk-management condition of businesses including petrochemicals and oil refining plants.
