EIT Digital, the digital branch of the European innovation agency EIT, opens a new Satellite Co-Location Centre (CLC) at the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI). From the CWI location at Amsterdam Science Park the the two organisations will work with industry partners on new fintech initiatives involving blockchain technology, Artificial Intelligence and cybersecurity.

Digital Finance

The new centre is part of EIT's new Action Line Digital Finance, launched earlier this year. As its name implies, the Amsterdam setup is the second CLC in the Netherlands, next to the existing Eindhoven Node in the Brainport region, where universities, research institutes, companies and other organisations are working on ICT innovations.

It is a strategic choice to have Digital Finance at the Dutch hotspot on this specific topic — that's Amsterdam, the financial heart of the Netherlands, says Patrick Essers, Director for the Netherlands at EIT. Together with our current partners, and in particular CWI who is the host of the Satellite CLC, we have decided to create a second place to initiate, stimulate and create open innovation. Amsterdam will work on Digital Infrastructure. For Eindhoven the main focus is on Digital Industry and Digital Wellbeing. And, in addition, both Amsterdam and Eindhoven will be working on Digital Cities.

In other countries where we have a CLC we are currently looking into locations for Digital Finance. Obviously, cities like London, Paris and Budapest will be working on this topic.

Blockchain research

According to Jos Baeten, the General Director of CWI, various people at the institute are working on blockchain-related research:

• cryptologic aspects (at the Cryptology group);
• smart contracts: domain-specific languages, compilers (at the Software Analysis and Transformation group); and
• smart trading and joint decision applications (at the Intelligent and Autonomous Systems group).

Specific topics CWI is working on are:

• improved or alternative approaches, e.g. security, proofs-of-resources;
• improved performance, e.g. latency, throughput, volume; and
• novel applications, e.g. smart contracts, energy, logistics.

Over the last three years, we had projects on these topics with partners such as Alliander and Poste Italiane, Baeten says. At the opening of the new centre, Tijs van der Storm will present his new research project, for which he is collaborating with ING and Deutsche Telekom.