IOTA chosen by EU to empower European Blockchain Services Infrastructure

In a resounding vote of support in IOTA’s distributed ledger technologies, the European Union have selected IOTA as one of seven blockchain companies tasked with delivering the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI).

The EBSI, which was founded in 2019, aims to to develop a blockchain network spanning across the EU which will unlock the potential of distributed ledger technology (DLT) for individuals, businesses, and governments seeking to conduct cross-border services.

The trustless flow of reliable data throughout the European Community will empower the creation of digital management systems for educational qualifications, provide fraud-proof digital audit trails for notaries, enhance data sharing amongst authorities, act as a source of startup financing, and lay the foundation for an EU digital ID.

The IOTA Foundation proved to be extremely well received in the tender process.

Requirements from the EBSI stipulated that chosen blockchains would need to offer a highly scalable, open source, fully decentralised, and completely interoperable solution. A tall order.

But the IOTA network’s impressive throughput and number of nodes, alongside its permissionless nature, put the network in good stead.

However, it was the impressive energy saving performance and feeless transactions that saw the proposal put forward by IOTA steal the attention of Brussels bureaucrats and secure the bid.

Government adoption of DLTs

Governmental deployment of blockchain technologies has become a hot focus this year, IOTA’s work with the EU will be very similar to that undertaken by Hoskinson’s Cardano Foundation in Ethiopia.

The Ethereum co-founder has been keen to emphasis government integration, with the IOHK team launching an education records blockchain this year, and a digital national ID system in the works.

Board members at IOTA are seemingly very pleased with the successful tender bid.

In comments shared with Coin Rivet, Dr. Navin Ramachandran, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of the IOTA Foundation, praised the project as an exciting real world use case for IOTA.

“EBSI is a project that is fully in tune with the IOTA philosophy and vision, and progressing through the strenuous procurement process has been an exciting and rewarding experience,” he said.

“The notion of an open-access, scalable, and versatile distributed ledger technology that will form the backbone of Europe’s digital single market is a natural fit to our own guiding principles.”

And Dr. Serguei Popov, IOTA Co-Founder, highlighted the significant scale of the undertaking as the company work to deliver digital decentralisation to the continent.

“Creating a blockchain network on a continental scale is an ambitious and technically challenging endeavor – just the kind of project IOTA has been built for,” he added.

“The EU is taking a massive step towards fulfilling its digitisation goal, and we look forward to the opportunity to contribute our production-ready technology to this momentous development that will change the way trustworthy information is shared across Europe and beyond.”

What is IOTA?

Most cryptocurrency projects rely on distributed ledger technology to process and verify transactions, this requires the incentivisation of miners with transactional fees on users and also pegs the scalability of a project with its node network capacity.

IOTA takes a completely different approach to DLT, that technically isn’t actually a traditional blockchain at all.

The DLT relies on something called a directed acyclic graph (DAG), which utilises a quantum-proof mechanism called a tangle that effectively operates as a web of blocks as opposed to a chain of blocks.

IOTA protocol transactions are confirmed by one or more following transactions, this is because the Tangle requires two parent transactions.

In effect, this offers a pay it forward model, in which one has to verify two other transactions to have theirs verified.

But it also enables exponential and feeless DLT – an attractive idea when compared to problems such as the high gas fees plaguing Ethereum (ETH).

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