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TrustChain will tackle several challenges pertaining to trustworthy and reliable digital identity, to resilient, secure and reliable data pathways, to economics and trading of data, to energy efficiency for data storage, transport and sharing, to seamless services and data flows through 5 Open Call as follows:

• Open Call 1: Decentralised Digital Identity;
• Open Call 2: User privacy and data governance;
• Open Call 3: Economics and Democracy;
• Open Call 4: Multi chains support for NGI protocols; and,
• Open Call 5: Green scalable and sustainable DLTs.

Through these 5 Open Call, (up to) 75 selected projects would have the potential to entail a substantial advance in the state-of-the-art, delivering new software solutions and services to the TrustChain ecosystem with potential to improve the Internet infrastructure and/or reach the market in the short run.

TrustChain offers equity-free funding (up to €117k per sub-grantee), access to mentoring and coaching for scaling up and business aspects, access to a wide network of blockchain experts and researchers and wider NGI community, access to top infrastructure, presence in top EU events related with blockchain, matchmaking services, as well as visibility and promotion through the TrustChain community and beyond.

TrustChain is a 3-year funded project. The indicative timelines for the active Open Calls are as follow:

• Open Call #3: Economics and Democracy (active)

Call announcement: 06 December 2023

Call closure and submission deadline (updated): 14 February 2024 at 17:00 CET

Evaluation period: Up to three months after call closure

Signature of sub-grant agreement: Up to one month after the announcement of the final list of selected projects

Projects: From July 2024 to March 2025 (9 months) 

• Open Call #2: User Privacy and Data Governance (closed)

Call announcement: 20 July 2023

Call closure and submission deadline: 20 September 2023 at 17:00 CEST

Evaluation period: Up to three months after call closure

Signature of sub-grant agreement: Up to one month after the announcement of the final list of selected projects

Projects: From January 2024 to September 2024 (9 months) 

• Open Call 1: Decentralised Digital Identity (Closed)

Call announcement: 08 February 2023

Call closure and submission deadline: 10 April 2023 at 17:00 CEST

Evaluation period: Until end of May 2023

Signature of sub-grant agreement: First week of June 2023

Projects: From June 2023 to February 2024 (9 months)

TrustChain Open Call #3 welcomes applications that will address specific challenges. Data exchange/trading space is a challenging one as there are multiple parties involved in the process. Issues around trust, privacy, consent and navigating the complex web of regulations are some of the challenges that organizations have to face in this space. The current market mechanisms for data exchange and data trading face these challenges, primarily due to the evolving nature of data and the digital landscape.  The third-party innovators also face numerous challenges in the current ecosystem around market competition, fair settlement and ownership of rights. Some of these challenges can be described as follows: 

• The current form of data sharing practise does not fairly reward the data owners/content producers. Data platform owners make decisions around the terms and conditions of data sharing. 
• Accurate data discoverability on such marketplaces is a challenge. Precise matchmaking between sellers and buyers on a marketplace can significantly improve its performance. 
• Data trading and exchange raise significant concerns about data privacy and security. There is a risk that sensitive or personal data could be mishandled, leading to privacy breaches, identity theft, or other malicious activities. 
• Establishing enforceable data marketplace contracts for data exchange is missing; Clear and fair service level agreements for both sellers and buyers needs to be in place for a trustworthy marketplace. 
• There is no standard pricing model for data, making it challenging to determine the fair market value of different data types. Mechanisms to ascertain the data quality and hence its price fairly is a challenging issue as the value of data can be subjective and context-dependent 
• Issue around data provenance exist as it can be difficult to verify the data source. Techniques to inspect the provenance of a specific product, service or data is missing. Open reputation management can be one of the solutions, but it requires careful design considerations. 
• Establishing clear data governance practices, including data access controls and usage policies, is essential for responsible data exchange. Data governance frameworks can be complex to implement and enforce. 
• Federated marketplaces among self-interested parties emerge in various contexts, such as cloud services, IoT data exchange and more, for increasing service coverage, availability, efficiency, etc. Providing support for trustworthy service provision logging, transparent billing, fair value sharing and coordination in resource allocation in these contexts is a challenge. 
• Innovative incentive mechanisms for decentralized, coordinated outcomes, potentially involving tokenomics, in various application contexts should be provided. 
• Enabling a sustainable circular economy that involves sharing, leasing, reusing existing materials and products demand data provenance on the transformation of properties of materials and on processes applied on them. Means to achieve such an economy requires innovation in terms of material traceability and digital passports. 
• Marketplaces for AI/ML models trading/exchange has witnessed a rise with advancement in AI training models and fear of data exchange due to privacy violations. A comprehensive comparison of such models on marketplace remains a challenge. 
• Digital solutions to enhance civic mobilisation and engagement. Such solutions can utilize real-time information, platforms for crowdsourcing ideas, and platforms for facilitating access to participatory channels, in order to transform and enhance democratic decision-making. 

The above examples are only indicative, and applicants can propose solutions that integrate one or more of them. Applicants can also submit a proposal under a different example scenario, as long as it serves the overall TrustChain vision and objectives while also fitting within the scope of human centric decentralised trustworthy Next Generation Internet. protocols. Proposed solutions should utilize existing concepts and technologies already developed for data value sharing and preserving user-privacy and fit within TrustChain’s vision and objectives. The solutions should be provided as open-source software desirably at TRL 7, tested and evaluated by an adequate pool of potential end-users that should be identified and mentioned in the application, as well as supported by a self-sustaining business model for exploiting the developed system at the end of the project. Each proposed solution will have to use the latest technologies for full-stack development that are compatible with the current standards.

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:

• 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.

TrustChain Open Call #2 welcomed applications that will clearly define, upgrade/extend the state-of-the-art, and develop the following types of solutions:  

• Enhanced Consent profiles to implement transparent and user-friendly consent mechanisms that clearly explain how user data will be collected, used, and shared. A mechanism to provide users the ability to form informed consent and easily manage their privacy preferences in data sharing models.
• Data Minimization and Purpose Limitation techniques built in the web framework so that only necessary data is collected for legitimate purposes. Data owners should have means to share only data necessary to access a particular service.
• Secure data exchange and privacy-aware data processing must be the cornerstone of the new data economy. Privacy of training data, machine-learning models and model parameters should be aimed for. [1]
• Developing new privacy preserving data flow techniques in line with international data sharing agreements (e.g., EU Data Spaces) so that the user has choice to tune data parameters for trading/sharing of data.
• Develop new mechanisms in line with the international data flows standards so that the data can move freely within the EU and across international borders including USA, Japan and China.
• Data identification, data provenance, data tracking mechanisms should be built so that the data that is exchanged can be tracked. Handling of the data according to the user consent provided in a data exchange should be verifiable.
• Data certification/verification methods should be developed to verify the trustworthiness of the data.
• Modern privacy enhancing technologies, such as local differential privacy and other interactive privacy techniques, taking also into account online publicly available datasets that can be linked to the original data.
• Data obfuscation, perturbation and anonymization techniques or their combination that properly address the trade-off between privacy-preservation and data utility.

The above examples are only indicative, and applicants can propose solutions that integrate one or more of them. Applicants can also submit a proposal under a different example scenario, as long as it serves the overall TrustChain vision and objectives while also fitting within the scope of human centric decentralised trustworthy Next Generation Internet. protocols. Proposed solutions should utilize existing concepts and technologies already developed for data value sharing and preserving user-privacy and fit within TrustChain’s vision and objectives. The solutions should be provided as open-source software desirably at TRL 7, tested and evaluated by an adequate pool of potential end-users that should be identified and mentioned in the application, as well as supported by a self-sustaining business model for exploiting the developed system at the end of the project. Each proposed solution will have to use the latest technologies for full-stack development that are compatible with the current standards.

Applicants are invited to submit their proposals on any topic that serves the overall TrustChain Open Call #2 vision and objectives. Their proposed solution should consider as minimal requirement to:

• 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.

TrustChain Open Call #1 welcomes applications that will clearly define, upgrade/extend the state-of-the-art, and develop the following types of solutions:  

• Decentralised user-centric identity management framework for supporting an automated privacy preserving, legal and regulatory compliant infrastructure (e.g., GDPR) potentially in alignment with emerging European regulations and standards (i.e. eIDAS).
• Protocols for trustworthiness assessment of entities by means of verifiable credentials and decentralised reputation systems.  
• Smart oracles assessing the trustworthiness of data associated with digital identities.
• Inclusive digital identity platforms focusing on marginalised communities (e.g., refugees, elderly, vulnerable).
• Social identity for delegation and recovery that drives community-based trust establishment (i.e., social guardians).
• Systems considering both public and private administration roles in issuing and managing decentralised identifiers.
• Decentralised identity systems supporting Decentralised Authority Organizations (DAOs)
• Use-case driven identity management system deployment (e.g., banking, publishing, healthcare, education etc).

The above examples are only indicative, and applicants can propose solutions that integrate one or more of them. Applicants can also submit a proposal under a different example scenario, as long as it serves the overall TrustChain vision and objectives and fits within the scope of human centric decentralised trustworthy digital identity. It should utilise existing concepts and technologies already developed for SSI and fit within TrustChain’s vision and objectives.

Applicants are invited to submit their proposals on any topic that serves the overall TrustChain Open Call #1 vision and objectives. Their proposed solution should consider as minimal requirement to:

• Use standard technology for full stack development;
• Be open source;
• Extends the state-of-the-art in the domain of digital identities, and/or solves existing real-world problems with digital identities and provides new highly usable software solutions.

Projects supported by TrustChain Open Calls have a duration of 9 months.

Cascade Funding, also known as Financial Support to Third Parties (FSTP), is a mechanism of the European Commission to distribute public funds in order to create new companies, increase their scalability, SMEs and / or mid-cap companies, in the adoption or development of digital innovation. The main objective of this financing method is to simplify administrative procedures with SMEs, thus allowing some projects financed by the EU to issue, in turn, open calls to obtain more funding.

Funding is given by the TrustChain project under a Sub-Grant Agreement signed by selected applicants and the TrustChain consortium. Funds are from the European Commission (Horizon Europe Framework Programme), which uses TrustChain as intermediary.

The funding mechanism relies on a cascade-funding scheme involving Horizon Europe funds. The scheme is based on a Grant Agreement signed by the European Commission and the TrustChain consortium partners. The Consortium partners receive the HE funds which are then transferred to the winners of the TrustChain Open Calls based on the rules and regulations explained in the Guide for Applicants (Open Call #3). It means that funds received by call winners are Horizon Europe funds.