EuropeChain – why we need it?

In October 2018 a number of EOS block producers got to together to figure out a problem facing regular businesses – both enterprise and startup – wishing to do business within the EU and on blockchain. There were many impediments despite reports heralding a veritable tsunami of projects lining up to dip their toes into the blockchain water.  Deloitte’s 2019 Blockchain report noted that only 5% of respondents denied they planned on investing anything into blockchain this year up against 16% at the top end suggesting they would invest in excess of $10million. Even the middle ground of 26% pledged to invest anything from $1million to $5million. So with all this investment poised to splurge what was the holdup? Well, actually it is a four letter acronym – GDPR.

And so was born the EuropeChain project. Headed up by CEO Rhett Pudkerk Pool of EOS Amsterdam, CFO Jan Smit of Dutch EOS, Sharif Boultila of EOS Dublin, Roman Shaskiw of Cryptolions, Sudip Banerjee of CryptoLions, and Jetse Sprey, legal and also of EOS Amsterdam, the consortium identified its mission statement as The stated goal of the project is to build and support a network of open, business first EOSIO blockchains which are EU regulatory compliant.

There are a number of general impediments to business adoption of blockchain that are well documented but the Europechain team identified them again:  Lack of transparency, fear of illegality, not wishing to pay for dev work in crypto, and general uncertainty and risk in this nascent industry.

However, the team also identified two other keys areas of concern: GDPR and regulation. GDPR is the killer issue not just for businesses operating within the EU but of course for any business wishing to contract business with a company in the EU. Secondly regulation, the bane of any business desirous of operating in a tax and legal compliant manner, is arguably absent in most blockchain fostered projects. The exception might be some of the closed proprietary protocols but they lack the speed and transparency of open source solutions.

Rhett explains why EuropeChain will solve these issues. “We are made up of a number of EOS Block Producers. We are real businesses, we have real entrepreneurial backgrounds, you can come to our offices and shake our hands. We are all tax compliant. We operate by the book.”

Already EuropeChain is generating interest. Another advantage is that companies can invoice monthly in fiat which is so much easier for the accountancy department – no hedging required.

As Rhett explains further: “We can offer businesses several models. Maybe a hotel chain with 50 hotels and two datacentres wants to move to the blockchain. We can set up maybe 7 nodes which would sufficient and certainly less expensive than a full 21 nodes. We are looking to offer blockchain as a service or BaaS, taking the complexity out of the deciding on what underlying architecture is required.”

Already the experienced team at EuropeChain has designed the architecture to offer GDPR compliant blockchain. A roadmap is in place with the project offering options to take on fully open chains or dedicated solutions. A constitution is in place. The team is in place.

“We had enough to bootstrap the tech and the team. Now we are looking to raise funds to go to market. With our approach we hope to capture a significant percentage of spend from traditional business looking to capitalise on the technology without exposing their business to crypto risk.”

For more information, please visit https://europechain.io/

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