Under the European Commission Next Generation Internet initiative, TrustChain is launched in January 2023. TrustChain aims to create a portfolio of Next Generation Internet protocols and an ecosystem of decentralized software solutions that reach the highest standards of humanity such as those chartered by the United Nations including the respect of human rights, ethics, sustainability, energy efficiency, our care for the environment and our respect for the World’s cultural history.
The digital era and existence of the internet is revolutionizing our health, our wellbeing, our social life, our education, our information. Spirit of the first-generation Internet based on individual freedom and material progress. Nowadays, essential ethical and democratic principles that should underline this technology are at stake. The design choices of the past based on a mix of centralized networked and device-based technologies, makes today’s Internet obsolete when it comes to empowering all citizens to act in/for the green and digital transitions, as well as to create a more resilient, inclusive and democratic society, addressing inequalities and human rights, prepared and responsive to threats and disasters.
For TRUSTCHAIN, the current emergence of Internet of Things (IoT), Decentralized Oracles, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud-to-Edge (aka Fog) Computing, Distributed Ledger (DLT) and Digital Twin (DT) technologies created the need to build democratic systems without central points of control that can establish the missing link between universally agreed objectives in the physical world, and the digital representation of the reality, thus contributing to the realization of trusted relationships in the Next Generation Internet. This can be achieved by using various consensus mechanisms that associate proofs with digital representations and thus help humans understand the objective truth, achieve trusted relationships on the digital world, allowing them to undertake well-informed decisions, in either a manual or automated manner. The ability to arrive at the objective truth by employing democratic governance mechanisms, consensus-based proofs, verification and certification can lead to a Next Generation Trusted Internet supporting humanity in all aspects of life. Today more than ever, challenges faced all over the world push for our society to reorganize itself to survive. Essentially, TRUSTCHAIN must be leveraged to embed in the Next Generation Internet principles of human-rights, sustainability, ethics and other human values that have been developed and maintained through long lasting centuries of human evolution.
Considering the aformentioned context, TrustChain aims to tackle several challenges pertaining to trustworthy and reliable digital identity, to resilient, secure and reliable data pathways, to economics and trading of data, to energy efficiency for data storage, transport and sharing, to seamless services and data flows. A new trustworthy data governance and sharing model will be developed in line with the European regulatory framework and taking into account European values while ensuring Trusted Data Ecosystems. Overall, TrustChain intends to empower citizens, civil society and organisations to better govern their online data thanks to a human centric approach.
Through its five Open Calls, TrustChain will support top Internet innovators (academies and high-tech companies) with a total amount of 8,8 M€ distributed with focus on the following topics:
(1) Decentralized digital identity,
(2) the User privacy and data governance,
(3) Economics and democracy,
(4) Multi chains support for NGI protocols, and
(5) Green scalable and sustainable DLTs.
Citizens and organisations perceptions will be the centre of all TrustChain interventions. Third party innovators will be guided through a human centred approach to be implemented and supported with a framework to follow all along their experiment for adopting users requirements and users validation. User perception of data security, privacy and trust will be investigated before internet solutions towards security and privacy actions are developed and offered to them. The approach includes: 1-Tackling the conceptual understanding of data security, privacy and trust as well as the social constructions around them, 2-Understanding how online trust is built by citizens/organisations, 3- Investigating the difference between what citizens/organisations know to be the best practices and what they really do when the time comes to make decisions during their online interaction. Once those three concepts will be understood within the societal context, crucial specific elements around human centric approach will be tackled: democracy and trust, economics/business for online data sharing; trust on the Internet and democratic organisation; green processes and energy efficiency on the Internet.
To sum up, TrustChain intervention will enable to:
- Tackled challenges faced by citizens/organisations when it comes to the management and sharing of their own data, integrating them in a co-design process to better answer their real needs;
-Attract and engage as much Blockchain & DLTs technology researchers, startups and SMEs;
-Leverage the development of new research fields and innovative products/ service applications;
-Build upon existing tools;
-Implement and feedback on Project new business models;
-Boost the innovative research topics, experiments and applications, broadening the portfolio of the TrustChain offers
-Increase outreach towards new regions and enhance the TrustChain concept footprint towards exploitation;
-Ensure that potential market barriers are removed through validated demonstrations;
