TrustChain Open Call #5: €1.989M Funding for Green, Scalable, and Sustainable DLT Solutions

They are looking for the most appropriate, relevant and pertinent tradeoffs between the use of technologies, the security of consensus protocols on one side, and the sustainability requirements on the other. A user-centric design, focused on energy efficiency, trustworthiness, and scalability, will guide the development of solutions. Privacy by design, greenness, openness, and legal compliance should be carefully considered.

Challenges

• Some of the challenges to be tackled in this call are the following:
  • Energy-Intensive Consensus Mechanisms: Reducing the energy usage of consensus protocols like Proof of Work without compromising system security and integrity between nodes. Develop consensus mechanisms that combine the features of traditional energy-efficient consensus mechanisms with the ability to interpret and agree on the meaning of complex data. This approach can significantly reduce the energy consumption of blockchain networks while ensuring that nodes reach consensus not just on transactions, but on the contextual understanding of external data.
  • Trustworthiness vs. Efficiency Trade-off: Maintaining high levels of decentralization to ensure trust and democratic control, while reducing the number of participating nodes to lower energy consumption.
  • Onchain/offchain Data Management and Transmission: Reducing the volume of data stored and transmitted across the network to decrease energy demands without compromising the accuracy, integrity, or trustworthiness of the information.
  • Integration of Digital Identities: Implementing digital identities to streamline processes and improve trust without undermining the privacy or security of the decentralized system.
  • Compatibility with Existing DLT Infrastructure: Ensuring that novel mechanisms designed for energy efficiency and sustainability can integrate smoothly with existing DLT systems without disrupting their functionality or scalability.
  • Oracles and Cross-chain Bridges: Energy efficient, secure, trusted, and privacy-preserving data processing technologies based on smart oracles for interfacing with the real world and bridges for interconnecting different chains.
  • Oracles for green certificates: Automating the issuance, tracking, and verification of green certificates, such as Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). By ensuring secure and tamper-proof data integration, decentralized oracles enhance the transparency and reliability of green certificates, enabling more efficient trading and preventing fraud in renewable energy markets.
  • Energy-efficient Trusted Enclaves: Energy-efficient Trusted execution environments, secure decentralized processing, secure multiparty computation, ZKP-based analytics, etc.
  • Energy-efficient DePINs: Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks collectively achieve to extend the physical infrastructure towards higher availability, higher coverage and lower marginal costs. However, emerging DePIN infrastructures are not always energy-efficient or cost-effective as a whole.

Funding Information

• Total EU funding available for OC5: 1 989 000 €
• Expected duration of projects: 9 months.

Eligibility Criteria

• The target applicants of this call are developers, innovators, researchers, SMEs, and entrepreneurs working on different NGI relevant topics and application domains at the intersection between the technical field (e.g., Software Engineering, Network Security, Semantic Web, Cryptography, Blockchain, Digital Twin, Blockchain Security, Digital Identity, Blockchain Protocol), the Social sciences and Humanities (e.g., Social Innovation, not-for-profit sector, Social Entrepreneurship, public goods) as well as any others including economics, environment, art, design, which can contribute to the NGI TrustChain relevant vision.
• Applicants can apply as individuals or linked to a legal entity. Hence, the participation is possible in several ways:
  • Team of natural person(s):
    • Team of individuals, all established in any eligible country. This does not consider the country of origin but the residence permit.
  • Legal entity(ies):
    • One or more entities (consortium) established in an eligible country. The entities can be Universities, Research centres, Non-Governmental Organisations, Foundations, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (see definition of SME according to the European Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC), large enterprises working on Internet or/and other related technologies are eligible.
  • Any combination of the above.
    • In addition, the following conditions apply:
      • The participating entities should not have been declared bankrupt or have initiated bankruptcy procedures.
      • The entities or individuals (Team of natural persons) applying should not have convictions for fraudulent behaviour, other financial irregularities, and unethical or illegal business practices.
    • Only Applicants legally established/resident in any of the following countries (hereafter collectively identified as the “Eligible Countries”) are eligible:
• Only applicants legally established/resident in any of the following countries (hereafter collectively identified as the “Eligible Countries”) are eligible:
  • The Member States (MS) of the European Union (EU), including their outermost regions.
  • The Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) linked to the Member States;
  • Horizon Europe associated countries, as described in the Reference Documents and the List of Participating Countries in Horizon Europe according to the latest list published by the European Commission.

For more information, visit TrustChain.