Blockchain technology has enormous potential to enhance the way that citizens, governments, and businesses interact, by enhancing trust between entities and improving the efficiency of operations.
The European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) is a joint initiative from the European Commission and the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP) to deliver EU-wide cross-border public services using blockchain technology. The EBSI will be materialised as a network of distributed nodes across Europe (the blockchain), leveraging an increasing number of applications focused on specific use cases. In 2020, EBSI will become a CEF Building Block, providing reusable software, specifications and services to support adoption by EU institutions and European public administrations.
Blockchain technology has great potential for governments and offers economic and political benefits.
Blockchain architecture offers economic benefits. In IT, distributed infrastructure results in technical interoperability, high resilience, high availability, and high load capacity. Consensus protocols ensure high data availability and integrity of data. Advanced cryptography offers high security. A distributed data structure enforces semantic interoperability and distributed processing increases process interoperability. Regarding cost aspects, inbuilt support for economic "mechanism design" allows provisioning those IT benefits at the most economic price.
Blockchain technology offers also political benefits. Infrastructure running blockchain software can be installed and operated in as many (or as few) MS as desire to join a given project, and each participating MS can run as many (or as few) nodes as desired
Specific platforms offer sophisticated governance mechanics that can be configured to mirror the governance of the EU itself (unanimity or qualified-majority voting, etc.) Immutable data is shared among participants with configurable transparency. This increases the trust among participants (MS governments / agencies), participation and auditability by the citizens (hence trust). Last but not least, they increase the effectiveness of policy instruments by adding economic incentives (economic mechanism design)
In order to study and to test the technology, DIGIT has performed the following actions:
- develop, implement and test one proof of concept: A Blockchain-Based Notary System
- develop, implement and test a private Blockchain network based on Ethereum POA protocol
- develop, implement and test a private Blockchain network based on STEEM protocol
