Open call #3 - closed!

Calling all developers, innovators, researchers, SMEs and entrepreneurs! €1.755.000 will be distributed among (up to) 15 selected projects!

TRUSTCHAIN OC3 focuses on trustworthy decentralized solutions in the realms of economics and democracy. Transparent decentralised decision-making and asset management is underscored, with a vision of enhancing democracy both online and beyond through decentralized markets and communities. It aims to tackle challenges like rampant fraud in online transactions and the manipulation of public opinion through fake news, which poses a threat to the quality of democracy. It advocates for decentralized communities with the ability to co-decide on sensitive issues while preserving the anonymity and votes of individual members. 

Other challenges are also important to consider like overcoming data siloing to unlock economic potential while ensuring privacy and control for data owners ; ensuring fair valuation of data depending on factors like quality and overall usefulness to facilitate efforts in federated learning and centralized AI models ; ensuring unbiases anonymous price determination mechanisms like auctions in online transactions ;  exploring incentive mechanisms, including tokenomics for achieving common goals, with a focus on decentralized governance and transparency ; ensuring trust, transparency, and fair value sharing in Federated or decentralized marketplaces among self-interested parties.

The objective of this TrustChain Open Call 3 (OC3) on “Economics & democracy” is to define and build market mechanisms for data exchange and data trading as well as innovative win-win federated business models open data in compliance with GDPR and other regulations that implements techniques such as:

  • Federated business models that consider fair rewarding of its participants,
  • Establish new or enrich the existing data marketplaces while ensuring privacy preserving data sharing on third-party platforms
  • Fair data marketplaces: publish, search, discovery, other mechanisms in decentralized environments; negotiation mechanisms for data prices,
  • Market competition that is fair and regulated in favour of the innovators,
  • Tokenization of assets and its fair trading, protection against scams such as rug pulls, initial coin offering (ICO) fraud in digital asset trading,
  • Establishing the value of the coins based on their quality contents; creating liquidity in the existing data marketplaces,
  • Decentralized governance models that are fair and trustworthy to all the parties in a data exchange ecosystem,
  • Use your eIDAS2 on the EU marketplaces,
  • Effective data monetization strategies and business models to incentivize data providers to share their data on exchange platforms.

Applications should cover real needs of the end-users in one a specific sector such as for example banking, education, healthcare, or e-government.

Applicants are invited to submit their proposals on any topic that serves the overall TrustChain Open Call #3 vision and objectives. Their proposed solution should consider as minimal requirement to:

  • Be grounded on end users needs and requirements, 
  • Use standard technology for full stack development,
  • Be open source,
  • Extend the state-of-the-art in the domain of user privacy, and/or solve existing real-world problems with data governance and provide new highly usable software solutions.

Phases of the Open CALL #3

Proposals are submitted in a single stage and the evaluation process is composed of three phases as presented hereafter:

  • Phase 1: Admissibility & eligibility check
  • Phase 2: Proposals evaluation carried out by the TrustChain Consortium with the assistance of independent experts.
  • Phase 3: Online interviews (10 minutes pitching & 20 minutes of Q&As) and final selection carried out by the TrustChain Consortium and the TrustChain Advisory Board Members.

As part of the TrustChain action, experts in diverse fields will also provide to Third party innovators selected technology development guidance, working methodology as well as access to technical infrastructure, training in business model development and data related topics, coaching, mentoring, visibility and community building support.

Selected projects will last for a duration of 9 months. However, the TrustChain overall action lasts 36 months, and the selected projects are requested to participate after these 9 months in future Joint Meetings for knowledge and know-how transfer to TrustChain OC4-5 and for the development of the TrustChain ecosystem.

HOW TO APPLY?

Open Calls will be handled using the F6S platform.

The call is open for submission from December 6, 2023 until February 14, 2024 (17:00 Brussels time). Its indicative budget is € 1.755.000 with up to a maximum of 15 proposals funded.

Eligibility

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 individuals, all established in any eligible country. This does not consider the country of origin but the residence permit.

One or more entities (consortium) established in an eligible country (see subsection 5.2). 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.

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:

  • The Member States (MS) of the European Union (EU), including their outermost regions. 
  • The Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) linked to the Member States [3]; 
  • 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.
 

[3] Entities from Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) are eligible for funding under the same conditions as entities from the Member States to which the OCT in question is linked.

SUPPORTED MATERIAL AND KIT FOR APPLICATION

TRUSTCHAIN was launched in January 2023 to address the inherent challenges within the current centralised Internet architecture that is not transparent to the user, does not protect the privacy-by -default and does not scale well through 5 Open Calls and an overall budget of 8,775 M €.

Learn more about the TrustChain project

This document is the open call announcement.

This document provides in detail the information to help apply to the TrustChain Open Call 3 such as an abstract of the TrustChain action, a description of the TrustChain Open Call 3, the modalities for application, the evaluation process, the scheme of the funding support, the IPR aspects related to TrustChain and how to prepare and submit a proposal:

The kit also includes the Model Sub-grant Agreement (draft template only), Administrative form (read only), Proposal description and the Additional Applicants templates.

 

Note: Word templates (Annex D and Annex E) are available at the F6S Submission System.

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