Blockchain is not just about powering decentralised finance (DeFi). As the Web3 conversation matures, we are seeing more and more interest in Decentralised Government (DeGov) services. The European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) is a major initiative at EU level, embracing Web3 and the future of eGov.

Web3 is a new decentralised model for the web – and will transform Government services

Last week, EBSI was present at the European Blockchain Convention (EBC) in Barcelona, where Europe’s Web3 ecosystem celebrated the many advances in innovative decentralised services; at this point, most of them are associated with Decentralised Finance (DeFi).

Despite being very diverse, most of these services are offered without the classic platform-model of the Web 2.0 era. In the last few decades this has been the dominant model, leading to the centralisation of the web around a few large platforms and an internet ecosystem dominated by BigTech, where data and services are under the central control of platform providers according to their terms of service. As a response, European innovators and start-ups are slowly starting to replace the Web 2.0 motto ‘trust the platform’ with Web3’s motto ‘don’t trust, verify’. How? By decentralising verification. This is possible as most of these new decentralised services are underpinned by a common decentralised immutable data register that no single entity controls. In other words, a truly immutable data common.

“Web3: don’t trust, verify”

In Web3, verifiability is essential but also easy thanks to the tremendous evolution of cryptography and decentralised ledger technologies such as blockchain. At the EBC, Joao Rodrigues Frade of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) showed that Europe is bringing the future of web into eGovernment - or rather, should we say Decentralised Government (DeGov)?

Making DeGov a reality for European Citizens

Most people don’t know that many European policies, EU regulations and directives, require some sort of information exchange between governments, businesses and/or citizens. In some cases, they might even require the creation of a new EU-wide information system. Therefore, the EBSI project is working with several policy departments of the Commission to help them deliver two main types of use cases using Web3 technologies:

1. Verification of Information using Verifiable Credentials, Digital Wallets and the EBSI ledger.

Information shared online is typically easy to fake and difficult to verify. Let’s take education as an example: verification of education credentials such as diplomas is still a challenging task, especially cross-border. In fact, anyone with basic computing skills can modify a diploma issued in plain PDF format. Designing verification of educational credentials as a Web3 service fixes this problem by:

• turning the diploma into a verifiable format i.e. Verifiable Credential (VC) instead of PDF;
• storing the credential in a digital wallet conformant to EBSI specifications; and
• using EBSI’s ledger as a trusted registry of Issuers of Diplomas instead of a central database under the control of a single entity.

The Web3 model turns things around as information becomes very easy to verify but difficult to fake, without the need to create any sort of central intermediation/platform. In this model, EBSI serves as the fully decentralised trusted registry of information about the issuers of education credentials, including their accreditation by the relevant authority at the national level. When presenting a diploma, the verifier can check and see whether it was issued by a trusted institution by looking up and fetching this information from EBSI’s ledger.

At the same time, this transformation also brings value to the student/worker as this is done in a privacy-preserving way. All personal data is kept on the user wallet and shared under the control of the student/worker. The verifier also does not need to contact the issuer directly, which means the issuer has no information about the student’s online activities.

Finally, EBSI does not prescribe a wallet. Instead, it allows wallets from private companies or public initiatives to become EBSI conformant – no wallet is given a first mover advantage. This results in diffusion of innovation from EBSI into the GovTech ecosystem. This means that European start-ups and SMEs also win from the work developed by EBSI.

It is important to highlight that the Verifiable Credentials framework of EBSI, based on W3C open standards, can be used in any other policy domain, with any type of document. For example, EBSI is already working on applying this framework to the social security domain, for cross-border verification of social security documents such as the Portable-Document A1 of posted workers.

2. Tracking and Tracing of information

The second family of use cases encompasses the Tracking and Tracing of information, such as fighting counterfeiting by combining the physical product with its digital representation (i.e. a digital twin). EBSI’s work in this area is only at its inception but watch this space for more info soon!

Europe as a pioneer of DeGov?

Governments in Europe and elsewhere are becoming more and more aware of the over-reliance on the platform model. Web3 is a great template for innovation which should lead to the provision of more decentralised government services. It is still early days but the potential for innovation in public services is massive. Furthermore, this innovation is favourable for government, citizens and businesses, including Europe’s GovTech ecosystem. Perhaps most importantly, Europe can lead the way in the transition from Web 2.0’s BigTech platform model to a vibrant European Web3 ecosystem.