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Dear blockchain enthusiasts,

We have exciting news to share with you about the Early Adopters Programme and EBSI wallet conformance testing!

Please contact us if you have any questions, comments or suggestions for future content.

EBSI Team

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EBSI Early Adopters and the multi-university pilot

Since 2020, EBSI has been deploying a network of distributed nodes across Europe, supporting applications in a growing number of use cases.

In 2021, 22 projects were selected to become part of an incubator programme, the multi-university pilot. This incubator programme will help the first EBSI users and their partners imagine, build and launch their pilot project(s). Each project's private and public sector partners was given early access to the pre-production environment of EBSI, and was invited to develop their own pilot project to address a specific business or government use case involving the exchange of verifiable credentials.

The EBSI Early Adopters have been challenged to test their different pilots in a real-life setting by taking part in the multi-university pilot. This allows them to test the interoperability of their solutions with other key actors in the ecosystem to allow for the exchange of verifiable credentials by students and universities: trusted accreditation organisations; trust issuers; holders of credentials; wallet providers and other partners. By the end of November 2021, the Member States and their partners will work to deliver all the required functionalities to make the multi-university cross-border scenario a reality.

Learn more about the EBSI Early Adopters Programme here.

If you are or know any wallet providers that would be interested to build a EBSI-compliant digital wallet, share this link with them!

If you want to help spread the word about EBSI, email us at EU-EBSI@ec.europa.eu and ask for our pre-prepared social media content, including draft text and visuals!

EBSI in light of the recent State of the Union address

In her September 2021 State of the Union address, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen outlined the flagship initiatives, which the Commission plans to undertake in the coming year. These initiatives include leading Europe's digital transformation that will create jobs and drive competitiveness while ensuring technical excellence and security of supply.

The European Commission also presented a proposal for a decision establishing the 2030 Policy Programme “Path to the Digital Decade”. This programme aims to ensure that the EU achieves its objectives and targets towards a digital transformation of our society and economy in line with the EU´s values, reinforcing Europe's digital leadership and promoting human centered, inclusive and sustainable digital policies empowering citizens and businesses.

The digital targets for 2030 are based on four cardinal points: digital skills, digital infrastructures, digitalisation of businesses and of public services. EBSI in cooperation with the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP) shows how Europe can achieve this objective.

The European Blockchain Week 2021

From 20-24 of September 2021, the European Blockchain Week took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia in framework of Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. In cooperation with the European Blockchain Partnership and the European Commission, this event highlighted the contribution of blockchain and AI to the transition to a green and digital Europe. Visit EBCW2021 for more details.

On 17 September 2021, the EBSI team released version v2.0.0-rc.6 to the pre-production environment. This environment includes a number of core services and smart contract code improvements as well as minor fixes. The teams are working closely together to support the EBSI Early Adopters, allowing them to progress quickly with their EBSI integration.

The team also released an Early Adopter demonstrator tool, which details the steps to onboard users in a business-friendly language. This tool allows users to create and register their DIDs to perform read operations on the EBSI network. The tool also allow for the ability to request to be onboarded as a legal entity, and therefore perform read/write operations.

The team is also supporting the Early Adopters by detailing the scope of upcoming versions (2.1.0 and 2.2.0) of EBSI.

The DevOps, security experts and architects team is progressing on the security dry-run on the production environment in order to assess and remediate any security vulnerability. The team is also performing penetration tests on the EBSI nodes. This allowed to remediate several security weaknesses, making the infrastructure more robust.

In the near future, the EBSI specific security benchmarks and tools will be made available to node operators.

• 30 September - 1 October 2021: European Blockchain Partnership quarterly meeting (EC-EBP internal meeting);
• 23-24 November 2021: Blockchain Expo Europe - This event will be an interactive panel discussions with expert keynotes and solution-based case studies. This event aims to explore the key industries that are set to be disrupted the most by blockchain.

How would you feel if your children told you they made more money than you would in some years by making and selling code-written basic digital artwork on their computer? This is the case for Imran Ahmed, a software developer and his 12-year old son Benyamin who is the creator of a set of pixelated images called Weird Whales, which are being sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Starting to learn coding at age five, Benyamin was inspired by a similar digital photo of a whale. He made his own program to churn out a group of 3,350 simple whale pixelated pictures, before turning them into NFTs and offering them to the market. The market responded and bought the secure digital art for €338,736.

"It was interesting to see all of them hatch, as they appeared on my screen slowly generating," he said. Benyamin has started working on a his next project, this time a superhero-themed art series.

Picture of Benyamin Ahmed by BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58343062

Fungible

Fungibility is a good or asset’s interchangeability with other individual goods or assets of the same type.

Fungible Token

Fungible tokens issued on a blockchain can be exchanged for another token that is of the same type (on Ethereum, these tokens are following the ERC-20 token standard).

Non-Fungible Token

Tokens that are, by definition, non fungible. This means that they represent a unique digital item, and are not inter exchangeable. Like any other unique item, they can be priced in any other (fungible) currency (on Ethereum, these tokens mostly follow the ERC-721 token standard).

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