This call is built on top of all past Open Call #1-4 calls.
The objective of this open call is to employ digital identities, trustworthy data, and already designed novel mechanisms for the ecosystems’ economy, in order to achieve high energy efficiency and optimisation of particular DLTs. We are looking for the most appropriate, relevant and pertinent trade-offs between the use of technologies, the security of consensus protocols on one side, and the sustainability requirements on the other. A user-centric design, focused on energy efficiency, trustworthiness, and scalability, will guide the development of solutions. Privacy by design, greenness, openness, and legal compliance should be carefully considered.
Applications should cover the real needs of the end-users in one specific sector such as banking, education, healthcare, or e-government, and address challenges such as:
– Energy-Intensive Consensus Mechanisms: Reducing the energy usage of consensus protocols like Proof of Work without compromising system security and integrity between nodes. Develop consensus mechanisms that combine the features of traditional energy-efficient consensus mechanisms with the ability to interpret and agree on the meaning of complex data. This approach can significantly reduce the energy consumption of blockchain networks while ensuring that nodes reach consensus not just on transactions, but on the contextual understanding of external data
– Trustworthiness vs. Efficiency Trade-off: Maintaining high levels of decentralization to ensure trust and democratic control, while reducing the number of participating nodes to lower energy consumption
– Onchain/offchain Data Management and Transmission: Reducing the volume of data stored and transmitted across the network to decrease energy demands without compromising the accuracy, integrity, or trustworthiness of the information
– Integration of Digital Identities: Implementing digital identities to streamline processes and improve trust without undermining the privacy or security of the decentralized system
– Compatibility with Existing DLT Infrastructure: Ensuring that novel mechanisms designed for energy efficiency and sustainability can integrate smoothly with existing DLT systems without disrupting their functionality or scalability
– Oracles and Cross-chain Bridges: Energy efficient, secure, trusted, and privacy-preserving data processing technologies based on smart oracles for interfacing with the real world and bridges for interconnecting different chains
– Oracles for green certificates: Automating the issuance, tracking, and verification of green certificates, such as Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). By ensuring secure and tamper-proof data integration, decentralized oracles enhance the transparency and reliability of green certificates, enabling more efficient trading and preventing fraud in renewable energy markets
– Energy-efficient Trusted Enclaves: Energy-efficient Trusted execution environments, secure decentralized processing, secure multiparty computation, ZKP-based analytics, etc
– Energy-efficient DePINs: Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks collectively achieve to extend the physical infrastructure towards higher availability, higher coverage and lower marginal costs. However, emerging DePIN infrastructures are not always energy-efficient or cost-effective as a whole
– Token strategies for sustainable goals: Appropriate incentives for sustainable goals may be provided by solutions involving innovative cryptos, tokens, tokenomics, and token strategies
– Balance between privacy and sustainability: it is known that the mechanisms known as PETs, which are applied to provide a layer of privacy to users are, in general, of high energy consumption. Teams must find solutions that optimize their use, applying each mechanism only when strictly necessary, always trying to find the most efficient solution at all times
– Adaptation to the Circular Economy and waste reduction: solutions must minimize the use of materials that generate waste or that are not recyclable. This challenge involves designing solutions that use renewable resources and consider the reuse and recycling of components, thus contributing to the circular economy
– Efficient use of underutilized resources: applicants should design solutions that utilize existing compute or storage infrastructure during periods of low activity. The challenge lies in developing mechanisms to automatically detect when infrastructures are in a low usage state and redirect processes to those resources without interrupting other operations.
Software Engineering, Network Security, Semantic Web, Cryptography, Blockchain, Digital Twin, Blockchain Security, Digital Identity, Blockchain Protocol
– Develop Energy-Efficient Consensus Mechanisms: Design and implement consensus mechanisms that reduce energy consumption, potentially moving away from Proof of Work (PoW), while ensuring the security and trustworthiness of DLT systems
– Introduce Sharding for Scalable Decentralization: Implement sharding techniques to divide the network into smaller, energy-efficient groups of maintainers, drastically lowering energy usage while maintaining the security and integrity of the entire DLT network. These techniques could be related or employ DePIN incentive mechanisms and approaches
– Optimize Data Management for Energy Reduction: Explore methods for secure data removal to reduce the storage demands of DLTs, allowing for the safe deletion of obsolete data while maintaining the integrity and reliability of the ledger
– Enable Consensus-less DLT Functionality: Investigate and implement systems that perform DLT functionalities without requiring communication between miners, eliminating the need for costly consensus protocols and drastically reducing energy consumption
– Ensure Interoperability and Scalability: Develop solutions that maintain openness and ensure that the optimized DLT systems can seamlessly interact with existing infrastructures, while ensuring scalability to accommodate future growth without increased environmental impact. Moreover, innovative DePIN solutions that enable scalability and sustainability are envisioned
– Energy-efficient and interoperable smart oracle solutions: Develop scalable, decentralized oracle solutions that exploit the capabilities of AI/ML, while being energy-efficient, and ensuring the reliability and integrity of real-world data. Interoperability with legacy systems, including legacy identity systems, is important. Also important is investigating the trade-offs between energy efficiency and other performance metrics such as latency and number of oracle nodes
– Energy-efficient Trusted Enclaves: Develop solutions and mechanisms towards energy-efficient trusted enclaves, potentially involving secure decentralized processing, secure multiparty computation, ZKP-based analytics, etc
– Energy-efficient Cross-chain bridges: Develop resilient and highly available bridging solutions that support interoperability and the seamless integration of multiple DLT-based ecosystems. These bridges should facilitate state/data/asset exchange, privacy-enabling mechanisms, and digital identities across multiple chains. The solutions can utilize mechanisms such as TEE, reputation, and data aggregation to ensure trust while increasing energy efficiency
– Energy-efficiency applications: Develop applications that make use of decentralized technologies and significantly impact energy efficiency, circular economy and sustainability, token strategies for sustainability, e.g., green certificates, digital product passports, etc.
In general, a user centric design and implementation, a co-created process with citizens as well as a use case driven approach will frame the proposed innovative solution development that should carefully consider the needs for security, privacy, human-rights, sustainability, and trustworthiness. Interoperability, scalability, greenness, openness, standards, as well as legal and regulatory compliance should also be considered, calculated, and assured.
The proposed solutions are intended to be co-created with end users focusing on online user privacy and data governance, adopting a user-friendly design. Therefore, they should be designed, implemented, piloted, and validated using a specific
predefined and justified set of end users in an identified use case. The co-creation and validation approach should be clearly elaborated in the applicants’ proposal. A citizen digital vulnerable collectives’ approach that puts in the centre the needs of the general population and vulnerable people, instead of technical/experts’ users should be considered. It is intended that the solution is accessible for the general population as well as for the marginalized/vulnerable communities.
To this end, the applicant should show collaboration with an EU end-user organisation (i.e., banking, healthcare, education, policing etc.) as well as consider vulnerable groups for the evaluation /validation process if possible.
Their proposed solution should consider as minimal requirement to:
o Be grounded on end-users needs and requirements,
o Use standard technology for full-stack development,
o Be open-source,
o Be of generic value for NGI software developers,
o Be able to integrate with the existing Trustchain solutions,
o Align with regulatory requirements and standards,
o Should be a plug-and-play solution for easy adoption by citizens,
o Be sector agnostic.
It is desirable that the selected projects be able to demonstrate their solution at TRL 7 in a real end-user setting. Selected projects will last for a duration of 9 months and costs of up to EUR 117K will be covered.
Applicants can apply as individuals or linked to a legal entity.
Hence, the participation is possible in several ways:
o Team of natural person(s):
Team of individuals, all established in any eligible country. This does not consider the country of origin but the residence permit.
o Legal entity(ies):
One or more entities (consortium) established in an eligible country. It can be Universities, research centres, NGOs, foundations, micro, small and medium- sized enterprises (see definition of SME according to the Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC), large enterprises working on Internet or/and other related technologies are eligible.
o Any combination of the above.
