Empowering and Building a Trustworthy Digital Society with EBSI
How blockchain brings benefits to the digital economy and what are the models that reinforce trust and transparency.
The European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) is a joint initiative to build a blockchain infrastructure for public services.
Since 2018, 29 countries (all EU Member States, Norway and Liechtenstein) have joined forces to form the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP). They have committed to working together towards building a European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI).
EBSI is the first blockchain infrastructure, driven by the public sector aiming to make the public services trustworthy and accessible for the citizens. The project is deploying a network of distributed blockchain nodes across Europe, supporting applications focused on selected use-cases.
The initial set of EBSI use cases
The project is focusing on a small number of specific use cases and will expand them over time.
- Identity: Implementing a Self-Sovereign Identity model in Europe, allowing users to create and control their identity credentials across borders.
- Notarisation: Leveraging the power of blockchain to create trusted digital audit trails, automate compliance checks and prove data integrity.
- Diplomas: Giving digital control to citizens when managing their education credentials, significantly reducing verification costs and improving authenticity trust.
- Trusted Data Sharing: Securely share data (such as IOSS VAT identification numbers and import one-stop-shop) amongst authorities in the EU.
Benefits from the adoption of blockchain
Designed as a market-friendly ecosystem, EBSI is based on open standards and a transparent governance model. For the benefit of society and the economy, it will simplify administrative processes, increase efficiency and enhance trust. Increasing traceability of transactions and ensuring data harmonisation are also part of the gains.
- Citizens: Opportunity to take control of their data, secure them and easily move with their credentials across Europe.
- Businesses: Opportunity to effortlessly interact with government agencies and reduce friction and administrative costs.
- Public administrations: Opportunity to protect against fraud, increase trust and make the verification of data authenticity easy.
What does EBSI mean for Bulgaria
The EBSI project possesses innovative and strategic value, involving the larger European community and providing services that will be available to all EU citizens.
EBSI gives the great opportunity for the Government of the Republic of Bulgaria and the state administration to make a leap in e-government and gradually migrate to a new system of documents, summarising facts, providing electronic services and digitising paper documents by participating in the European Blockchain Partnership. The roll-out of ESBI in Bulgaria will allow the delivery of cross-border public services based on open-source blockchain technology and enhancing the way citizens, government and businesses interact.
The selected use cases
The project will cover infrastructure development, maintenance of the Bulgarian EBSI node and solution implementation for two use cases: Self-Sovereign Identity and Notarisation.
Self-Sovereign Identity
Allowing people to manage their data and provide governments with attestations from organisations, such as banks, utility companies, mobile operators, license issuers, etc. Citizens will no longer have to physically visit places to collect data (e.g. to a medical specialist or a municipality office). That assures citizen-centric privacy, digital trust, and massive simplifications on data sharing.
Implementing the model will help organisations that need valid data for use in administrative or business processes to decide whether a request is to be serviced or denied. Such as citizens applying for a subsidy or benefit, renewing a drug prescription, etc. That makes business transactions much easier, cheaper, and faster.
Notarisation
The use case supports the registration of documents and transactions using digital signatures in a GDPR safe way. The notarisation service allows users to:
- Register digital documents, verify their authenticity and create a secure audit trail.
- Record and link together digital footprints of files and their metadata.
- Create a time-stamped audit trail for bi-directional exchange of digital footprints with third parties.
INDUSTRIA’s role and the Bulgarian consortium
INDUSTRIA is a technology consulting and development firm with a focus on distributed ledger technology, smart legal contracts, app development, and UX design. We have significant experience in developing solutions based on blockchain technologies for different industries and across Europe.
In this consortium, we have the leading role and will be responsible for project management, overall governance of the proposed project, the dissemination, and exploitation of the project results and the management of the intellectual property.
Consortium partners
LimeChain focuses on public and private blockchain development, and smart contract development, providing complete and user-friendly solutions.
In this consortium, LimeChain will lead the design and development of the European Self-Sovereign Identity use case.
ReCheck provides technical expertise and know-how in the development of blockchain-based solutions. The company is a pioneer in developing decentralized applications that generate practical value to businesses.
In this consortium, ReCheck LTD will lead the setup and deployment of the Bulgarian EBSI node and the development of the Notarisation use case.
The Edge is a new spin-off company of Junior Achievement Bulgaria that aims to fill in the gap between innovative, high-tech academic research and its commercialisation worldwide.
In this consortium, The Edge Research and Business Development Ltd will be responsible for the development and maintenance of the national Helpdesk and the design and delivery of the classroom training programme.
Aeternity Ventures is an investment company, focusing on funding early-stage projects. They have successfully executed four batches of а full-service global acceleration programme and further business development mentoring for seed-stage startups utilising blockchain.
In this consortium, Aeternity Ventures will be responsible for the delivery of the online training programme and the development of specific tools and technical resources.
Originally published at https://www.industria.tech.
