European Commission announces six prize winners for DLT to address societal challenges.

The European Commission is announcing six Prize winners, selected to receive a total of EUR 5 million to apply distributed ledger technology to societal challenges.

Winning projects support traceability and fair trade; financial inclusion; decentralised circular economy; transparency of public processes; participation in democratic decision-making; and management of public records.

This award, conducted as part of the NGI initiative, was launched with the funding of the Enhanced European Innovation Council (EIC) pilot, which supports top innovators, entrepreneurs, small companies and scientists to scale up their innovations through funding, coaching and networking.

The Prize supports solutions developed in Open Source. This will enable more innovators to benefit from the advanced technological solutions developed by participants.

The results of this Prize are important for the development of the Next Generation Internet initiative, which continues to explore the potential of Blockchain in new application areas, in particular, to address local and global sustainability challenges in relation to the SDGs.

THE WINNERS

Quality Content: WordProof (by Dutch SME WordProof B.V.) developed the WordProof Timestamp Ecosystem, a technology able to prove authenticity and to make information verifiable, which ultimately would be leading to more trust in internet content. With the timestamps, content owners can show that they did not tamper with their content, and the history of changes becomes verifiable for both humans and machines. It is proposed as a free browser plugin.

Traceability & Fair Trade: PPP (by UK social enterprise Project Provenance Ltd) developed Proof Points to allow businesses to prove their social impact across the supply chains behind their business and products.

Financial Inclusion: GMeRitS (by Finnish university Aalto) is conducting wide-scale experiments with alternative economic structures, to try and evaluate various anti-rival compensation and governance structures, contributing to financial inclusion.

Aid & Philanthropy: the UnBlocked Cash Project OXBBU (by Irish Oxfam and French startup Sempo) pioneers a decentralized model to address the global challenge of delivering international aid to disaster-affected women and men in ways that are more efficient, transparent and sustainable.

Decentralised Circular Economy: CKH2020 (by French cooperative Kleros) is a platform for resolving consumer disputes in e-commerce or collaborative economy. Blockchain guarantees that no party can tamper with the evidence nor manipulate jury selection and that rulings are automatically enforced by smart contracts.

Energy: PROSUME (by Italian Prosume srl) is a DLT-based platform providing a decentralized and autonomous digital marketplace for peer-to-peer energy trading. Its goal is to integrate prosumers – consumers who are also producers of renewable energy- in the so-far highly monopolised and fossils-based energy sector.

While the potential of Blockchain has been tested in the financial domain its possible applications in social domains and to address sustainability challenges have been explored far less.

The goal of the EIC Prize on Blockchains for Social Good was to recognise and support the efforts made by developers and civil society in exploring the applications of blockchain in the area of digital social innovation.

More information can be accessed via the website  www.ngi.eu

or through Facebook and Twitter at @NGI4EU. 

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