IOTA selected for European blockchain project

Reducing bureaucracy, the movement of goods, decentralized identities or the Internet of Things: Blockchain technology plays a key role in digitization. Since 2018, the EU Commission has been supervising the “European Blockchain Services Infrastructure” (EBSI) project – a system for data traffic based on decentralized technologies. With the entry into development phase 2A, the European blockchain solution is gradually becoming more concrete. Leading the way: The IOTA Foundation, which could play a decisive role in shaping the EBSI with the Tangle technology.

As one of five remaining projects, IOTA made it to Phase 2A of pre-commercial procurement. This will give the IOTA Foundation additional funds to develop prototypes for future EBSI versions. Key areas of research for deploying IOTA technology are interoperability, scalability, energy efficiency, security, consensus, identity and governance.

IOTA is entering the hot phase

IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener explains that the IOTA team is developing solutions “tailored to the specific requirements of EBSI”. These include “specific requirements such as access control or trusted data sharing”.

The European Blockchain Services initiative aims to replace the current system, which is based on Hyperledger, with a new system that can form the backbone for many trusted cross-border European services. The system should be scalable, accessible and interoperable and offer functions such as identity and access management. IOTA’s core technology meets all of these criteria and we hope to be able to contribute to a large part of the EBSI infrastructure

The phase is expected to last about six months. After completing some series of tests and prototype development, the European Commission validates the results and selects at least three projects for the subsequent phase 2B. This section will be “expected to last another year” and deal with the “final development of solutions and field tests”, as the Foundation does in one blog entry writes. According to this, the IOTA team will “test innovations that could benefit the EBSI infrastructure” in the coming months.

Something on the agenda

It cannot be ruled out that the Tangle technology could have a decisive influence on the EBSI architecture. “The IOTA protocol and its tangle already offer full, public integration or a ‘private, allowed tangle’ to everyone. But private tangles can also be integrated into the public tangle,” explains Schiener. According to this, “using the public IOTA Tangle would enable access and interoperability beyond the permitted actors and enable EBSI to interact with external actors”.

On the side, the IOTA team is still working flat out on Coordicide – the 2.0 network environment without a central control instance. The work on it will not be delayed by participating in the next EBSI development phase, Schiener assures: “Most of our technical roadmap is directly in line with the requirements of the EBSI. The team is aware of this roadmap and our offers reflect the expected timelines of upcoming developments. ” 2022 therefore promises to be an extremely exciting year for IOTA.