#EUBlockchain

Dear blockchain enthusiasts,

As the winter holidays are approaching, the team will also be going on a break. But before that, we wanted to treat you with the last newsflash of the year!

The technical office has been continuously working on providing critical resources and documentation to Early Adopters. On 9-10 December 2021, the most advanced Early Adopters showcased their demos on user journeys during the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP) quarterly meetings.

During the EBP policy group quarterly meeting, the rotating co-chairs of the EBP were appointed for the next 18 months.

Don't miss our fun fact on the use of blockchain in the philanthropic sector if you want to know more about cryptocurrency donations or how can blockchain help to resolve public trust in charitable organisations.

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

We wish you all the best for the coming holiday season and we are looking forward to bringing you more content on EBSI in production in 2022!

EBSI Team

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First demos of the Early Adopters - an important milestone for EBSI!

On 9-10 December 2021, the EBP quarterly meetings for the technical and the policy group place took place. During these meetings, the European Commission and the EBP discussed the EBSI state of play and the project roadmap for production for the coming year.

The most advanced Early Adopters showcased their progress of EBSI through the first demos, namely:

• AOC pilot "Digital Citizens wallet" (Open Administration Consortium of Catalonia);
  
• Cypriot-Greek pilot "Cypriot citizen's journey as a Greek university graduate" (CY-EBSI in collaboration with GUnet);
• Dutch-Spanish pilot;
• German-Austrian pilot (UniCert and EBSI4Austria);
• Una Europa pilot (KU Leuven and University of Bologna).

The Early Adopters demonstrated their progress in the integration of cross-border scenarios. This included real interactions in the exchange of educational credentials or diplomas. This event marked an important milestone for EBSI because the Early Adopters successfully demonstrated cross-border interoperability. After the presentation of their demos, the Early Adopters showed the projections for their projects to go live next year.

As foreseen by the EBP rules, the EBP policy group announced the new co-chairs for the next period during the quarterly meeting. This follows the rotation principle of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, by which the Member States holding the presidency for the next 18 months work together closely in a group of three.

The new co-chairs will be the representatives from France, the Czech Republic and Sweden. We would like to warmly thank the co-chairs from Germany, Portugal and Slovenia for their fruitful work over the past year and a half!

On 3 December 2021, the EBSI team organised the third Wallet Conformance Testing webinar. The technical office introduced new critical resources for the wallet providers, such as detailed test scenarios, JSON schemas, API mocks and thorough documentation. Among the wallets going through the conformance testing, the three most advanced presented their current progress. They are committed to become EBSI-compliant by the end of December 2021.

On 13 December 2021, the EBSI technical office released the EBSI version v2.0.0-rc.10 to the pre-production environment. This release includes minor upgrades to the core services along with the Wallet Conformance Testing mock services. After this release, any wallet provider involved in the Early Adopters programme and interested in testing the conformance of their wallet with EBSI should be able to do so.

The second iteration of the infrastructure hardening track was finalised. As a result, the technical office will soon be ready to share the collection of custom security benchmarks and testing tools with the node operators.

The EBSI DevOps, security experts and business analysts are now progressing on the security track, focusing on the delivery of the Business Continuity Planning (BCP), technical governance and a number of documents critical to the launch of EBSI to production.

• 17 December 2021: Obligation du supplément au diplôme, Europass et le RNCP (French only) - This webinar will highlight the concept of Diploma Supplement and its integration in the professional career. This event will offer a unique opportunity for stakeholders to discuss the added value of blockchain in the context of issuance of diplomas with Béatrice Rouzé, Senior Executive of the Directorate for Pedagogical Innovations, and Claire Génin, member of the engineering of the fr.EBSI project.
• 13-14 April 2022: Paris Blockchain Week Summit - During two days, Paris Blockchain Week Summit will host sessions about traceability, leveraging blockchain throughout the innovation journey, digital governance, what's been built in 2021/2022, the state of digital asset liquidity, international regulatory cooperation and much more.

The use of Blockchain in philanthropy

Over the past years, cryptocurrency as a form of payment has spread all over the world. The number of cryptocurrencies worldwide has skyrocketed from 66 in 2013 to over 7000 in November 2021. There has been a rise of donations in cryptocurrencies in the philanthropic and the non-profit sector as well.

GivingTuesday is an important day in the charity world. This global generosity movement incites people to give back in whatever form they can to the community. During this year's GivingTuesday, for example, there was a 583% increase in cryptocurrency donations compared to last year. The #CryptoGivingTuesday initiative raised over €2 million in cryptocurrencies.

Cryptocurrencies are not the only way through which blockchain is transforming the charity world. Lack of public trust in the accountability and transparency of charities has been one of the burning issues in the philanthropy sector. One of the major questions a donor is asking before allocating his or her fund is "where will my money end up in the end?".

Blockchain can be an answer to this question. It can help renew public trust in charities by enabling benefactors to track the donation life-cycle. Thanks to the transparent and immutable nature of the underlying blockchain technology, it allows the donor to track transactions on the ledger at any moment.

Going a step further, a British startup built a pilot leveraging the use of smart contracts. The smart contracts can freeze donations until charitable organisations demonstrate a concrete result that is verified and confirmed by an independent third party. If the donation did not reach its goal, the money would be returned.

Although the use of blockchain is still nascent in the charity world, it has a big potential to positively contribute to the philanthropy sector by bringing more transparency and by serving as a means of donation in itself.

Immutability

Immutability is one of the main properties of blockchain. It enables a blockchain ledger to remain unchanged and unaltered. This means that once you have agreed on a transaction and recorded it, it can never be changed.

Smart contract

A smart contract is an irreversible self-executing contract between two or more parties. Essentially, it is a computer code that underlines the conditions and terms of agreement of the contract and is publicly available on the blockchain network. Smart contracts allow different parties who often don't trust each other to transact without the need for a central authority, legal system or any other type of intermediary.

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