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European Commission ‘actively monitoring’ Blockchain developments

The Vice-President of the European Commission, Andrus Ansip, recently provided details on initiatives, projects and partnerships to foster decentralised innovation ecosystems in Europe. “The Commission is actively monitoring Blockchain and DLT developments,” he said.

The Vice-President of the European Commission, Andrus Ansip, recently provided details on initiatives, projects and partnerships to foster decentralised innovation ecosystems in Europe. “The Commission is actively monitoring Blockchain and DLT developments,” he said.

“Distributed ledger technology’s (DLT) almost limitless list of potential use cases makes it both very promising and challenging. Beyond financial services applications, which are being explored by banks and financial institutions, many other sectors are piloting with the technology. “
— – Andrus Ansip European Commission Vice-President

The details were provided in an official answer to a question from Parliament member Sorin Moisă, from Romania, submitted on November 30th 2016 Parliament members can submit questions for written answer to the President of the European Council, the Council, the Commission or the Vice-President of the Commission /High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security.

“Distributed ledger technology (DLT) has shown high adaptability in a variety of market sectors,” Moisă states. “Many industries have anticipated its potential benefits, one recent example being the pharmaceutical industry which plans to fight counterfeit drugs by tracking medicines using immutable data.”

Ansip states that the Commission has set up a FinTech Task Force, following a report on Virtual Currencies from Parliament Member Jakob von Weizsäcker, published in May 2016. “Seven years after the launch of Bitcoin, the first and most prominent virtual currency (VC), it has become clear that the underlying innovation, distributed ledger technology (DLT) is set to have a significant impact on the financial sector and beyond,” von Weizsäcker states in the report.

“This technology, in principle, enables a decentralised, rapid, resilient and rather secure means of recording any sort of transaction together with the history of previous transactions in a ‘distributed ledger’. Investment in DLT is soaring and certain applications could rapidly become systemic. A work stream is dedicated to explore DLT benefits and challenges as well as fields for application in financial services.”
— – Jakob von Weizsäcker, European Parliament Member

Beyond financial services, the Commission is actively reflecting on possible pilot projects to foster decentralised innovation ecosystems and help reshape interactions between consumers, producers, creators and among citizens, businesses and administrations to the end benefit of society.

The Commission is already supporting DLT-enabled projects, including Decentralised Citizens Owned Data Ecosystem, Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies, and MyHealth MyData. Ansip states that support activities are going to increase in the coming months.

My Health – My Data’ (MHMD) launched last November, and has funding until the end of 2019, with a total cost of €3,944,940 paid by the Commission. The project is concerned with the privacy of healthcare records, and is being run in Italy.

“The current IT landscape in this field shows a myriad of isolated, locally hosted patient data repositories, managed by clinical centres and other organisations, which are subject to frequent and massive data breaches,” states the MH-MD project details. “Patients are disenfranchised in this process, and are not able to have a clear understanding of who uses their personal information and for what purposes.”

“MyHealthMyData (MHMD) aims at changing the existing scenario by introducing a distributed, peer-to-peer architecture, based on Blockchain and Personal Data Accounts.”
— – MyHealth MyData

Decentralised Citizens Owned Data Ecosystem (DECODE), has a budget of €4,988,923.75 to run until the end of 2019, and is based in the UK. “Today’s Internet is becoming increasingly centralised, slowing innovation and challenging its potential to revolutionise society and the economy in a pluralistic manner,” states the DECODE project details.

The project is developing practical alternatives, the details claim, “through the creation, evaluation and demonstration of a distributed and open architecture for managing online identity, personal and other data, and collective governance in a citizen-friendly and privacy-aware fashion.”

This will be achieved while increasing “digital sovereignty of Europe and citizens,” by enabling them to produce, access and control their data and exchange contextualised information in real-time, and in a confidential, and scalable manner.

The result is a modular privacy-aware IoT hub with a free and open source operating system backed by blockchain infrastructure supporting smart-contracts and privacy protections. The architecture will be demonstrated through four pilots in Barcelona and Amsterdam, in the field of digital democracy, citizen sensing, and collaborative economy.

The pilots will be run with the active involvement of social entrepreneurs, hackers, and makers. Innovators will be able to build solutions on top of the platform through hackathons and open challenges, while ensuring their security, resilience and privacy preserving qualities.

“This aims to create a decentralised innovation ecosystem that will attract a critical mass able to shift the current centralised data-driven economy towards a decentralised, sustainable and commons-based economy.”
— – Decentralised Citizens Owned Data Ecosystem

Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies (D-CENT) has been in place since 2013, and runs out of funding in May, having cost €2,638,868. As with DECODE, the D-CENT details also claim the internet is becoming highly centralized, while stating that the project, “will accelerate innovation in the use of the Internet to help communities share data and collaborate to address major societal challenges.”

The project aim to accelerate the development of practical alternatives, through experiments creating useful new tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment, as well as research. “D-CENT will create a bottom-up, decentralised, open platform for collective awareness based on integrating already successful open-source codebases,” the project details state.

Its first practical experiments address democratic engagement, building on Europe’s largest experiments in direct democracy – the Open Ministry linked into parliament in Finland, and the involvement of the whole population in shaping a new wiki-constitution in Iceland – as well as one of Europe’s most dynamic social movements and new political parties, in Spain.

“These will show how millions of citizens can become engaged in day-to-day deliberation, and decision-making.”
— – Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies

Its second cluster of experiments connect these new approaches to empowerment to economic platforms. The experiments included a cryptocurrency platform called Freecoin, which is described as a “new disruptive digital social currency based on the blockchain,” deployed in Finland, Iceland and Spain.

Freecoin was designed to facilitate the usage and integration of cryptographic blockchain technologies for the social good, creating the building blocks for a sharing economy that links exchange to trust, deliberation, and collective awareness. “The component should be easy to deploy and adapt in different scenarios where the function of distributed authentication is crucial to establish bottom-up trust in value circulation and decision-making systems,” the project details state.

However, the Freecoin website, which claims to be the same EU-funded program, doesn’t claim to be a cryptocurreny, but “a web application that can be used stand-alone or integrated into systems,” to facilitate “value circulation and identity management, supporting multi-signature authentication and off-line transactions on top of multiple blockchains backends.”

“Freecoin is a set of tools to let people run reward schemes that are transparent and auditable to other organisations,” the website states. Further explanations make the project sound more like a counterparty token wallet than a currency. A search for Freecoin’s name on cryptocurrency-tracking websites return no results. “Freecoin development has started recently and not yet ready for production use,” the website explains today.

The response to Parliament Member Moisă also states that a study will be launched to investigate how DLT can help in reshaping public services and preparing for EU specific DLT actions to address relevant EU challenges. The Commission will also organise a kick-off conference with the European Parliament on Demystifying Blockchain and a series of workshops to look at Blockchain developments and use case applications.

As part of the Start-up and Scale-Up Initiative, the Commission will investigate how to develop experimentation frameworks enabling innovation. DLT can be considered as offering innovative solutions to existing and emerging challenges.

Moisă also asked for details on regulation. “Has the Commission identified specific areas in which DLT needs regulatory measures? If so, could the Commission provide some examples?” The response from Vice-President Ansip contains no relevant information.


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