The European Union and its EEA/EFTA partners have established global leadership with their vision for cross-border public services in the 29 European Blockchain Partnership countries. The work undertaken on EBSI underlines the strengths of decentralised technologies to serve the EU’s multi-level governance, while further stimulating the development of this technology to increase energy efficiency, privacy compliance, interoperability, cybersecurity and resilience.

On 8 October 2019, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre invited leading blockchain experts to the event "Blockchain Now and Tomorrow: Assessing Multidimensional Impacts of Distributed Ledger Technologies." This event launched the important report “Blockchain Now and Tomorrow", which provides multidimensional insights into the state of blockchain technology. Peteris Zilgalvis, Head of the Digital Innovation and Blockchain Unit in the Directorate-General or Communications Networks, Content and Technology presented EBSI at this event.

The Commission has recently launched two surveys with the EBP Policy Group. The first survey aims at discovering policy priorities in the field of blockchain and distributed ledger technology. The second one will help identify potential new use cases that could be deployed through the EBSI V.2. The EBP Policy group will discuss the survey results during its next quarterly meeting that will be held on 12 November 2019 in Malaga, in the context of the "Convergence conference". This event represents an ideal opportunity for fostering dialogue between decision makers from the public and the private sectors.

Finally, a survey concerning the preparation of the new EU Digital Europe Programme is on-going until Friday, 25 October 2019. It is a great opportunity to learn about the Digital Europe programme and to highlight the importance of blockchain amongst the priorities to be funded through it. Your contribution is therefore of great importance to the future of blockchain and EBSI.