The European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) aims to deliver cross border public services. Hence in late 2020, the European Blockchain Partnership issued a call for tenders to develop a series of use cases that EBSI can deliver. This week it announced that IOTA, Chromaway and Billon have made it to the final cut of the ‘pre-commercial procurement’ process.
All the final round companies appear to be focused on digital product passports to help to encourage recycling. Two of the three firms also proposed IP rights management use cases. This is an indicator of EBSI’s next applications.
In terms of product passports, IOTA is targeting consumer electronics and batteries, Chromaway is focused on pharmaceuticals, and Billon selected plastic waste and batteries.
One observation is there are already commercial blockchain applications being deployed in these areas by the likes of Circulor, Circularise, Everledger and PharmaLedger. So will these public use cases crowd out these commercial applications?
EBSI has already implemented four use cases for notarization, self-sovereign identity, education credentials, and trusted data sharing for customs and VAT. It is currently working on a social security passport, an asylum use case and SME support.
The selected companies have to deliver on several EBSI requirements, including being sufficiently scalable to support high transaction volumes. Any solution has to be green, secure and cost efficient.
For the first phase in July 2021, seven firms were selected. This included the three finalists plus IOV42, a Stichting Dyne/ RIDDLE&CODE consortium, Orange Business Belgium and a Westpole Belgium consortium.
