The International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) recently published a report exploring EU consortia and global trends in industrial blockchains. It’s a broad report that looks at both public consortia such as Europe’s EBSI/Europeum and private consortia across several industry sectors. Blockchain has been embraced far more in some sectors than in others. It’s strong in mobility, energy and circularity. The surprising area where DLT appears to have less traction is supply chain and digital product passports. However, this is at the level of consortia. In many cases, individual companies are making strong headway.
One observation we’d add is that there are a lot of European consortia compared to the United States. Which brands come to mind when you think about innovation? Are they in the US or Europe? Consortia are notoriously hard and have a poor track record of success. We’ve particularly seen that over the years with blockchain consortia. Often startups have a better chance of success if they set up as a vendor. Or better yet, if they create a solution that adds interoperability to existing vendor solutions in a particular industry.
That said, some of the biggest names in finance started as consortia: think Visa, Mastercard and Swift.
The INATBA paper
Not all the consortia in the INATBA paper are currently using blockchain. Most expressed an interest in the technology or the consortium members include blockchain startups.
For example, Catena-X (part of GAIA-X) is the large automotive supply chain consortium. Early on there were plans to use blockchain, and the consortium includes several blockchain startups and large firms that are blockchain friendly (eg. Bosch, BASF, BMW). However, the crypto winter coincided with the technology selection, and the paper asserts the timing discouraged the adoption of the technology.
Manufacturing-X is a consortium that’s at an earlier stage, and INATBA recommends it considers blockchain and self sovereign identity (SSI). CIRPASS is a digital product passport consortium that also does not use blockchain at its core, although one of its case studies uses DLT.
Even if the automotive supply chain consortium doesn’t use blockchain, the technology is quite popular in the mobility sector. One example of a consortium using it MoveID, a GAIA-X mobility identity project led by Bosch. It uses self sovereign identity and has two layer 1 blockchains are involved, Fetch.ai and Peaq. Fetch is closely associated with Bosch. An example of a MoveID use case is the ability to discover and transact with electrical vehicle charging units.
While the paper gives a strong mention to several members of INATBA (especially 2Tokens), the coverage is sufficiently balanced to include several companies that are not members.
Overall, the paper is a useful overview of many of the industrial consortia that are active in Europe. It remains to be seen if the INATBA community can convert some of the DLT holdouts.
