FAQ
Still need help?
Fell free to contact us
Here you can find the answers for the most common questions asked by the applicants.
TrustChain Project
TrustChain – Fostering a Human-centred, Trustworthy and Sustainable Internet is a 3-year project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe Research and Innovation programme (GA 101093274), which aims to create a portfolio of Next Generation Internet protocols and an ecosystem of decentralised software solutions that reach the highest standards of humanity such as those chartered by the United Nations including the respect of human rights, ethics, sustainability, energy efficiency, our care for the environment and our respect for the World’s cultural history.
The Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, launched by the European Commission in the autumn of 2016, aims to shape the future internet as an interoperable platform ecosystem that embodies the values that Europe holds : openness, inclusivity, transparency, privacy, cooperation, and protection of data. The NGI will drive this technological revolution and ensure the progressive adoption of advanced concepts and methodologies spanning the domains of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, interactive technologies and more, while contributing to making the future internet more human-centric.
Open Calls
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: Decentralized 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 5: Green scalable and sustainable DLTs
Call announcement: 11 November 2024 at 13:00 PM CET
Call closure and submission deadline: 15 January at 2025 t 17:00 CEST
Evaluation period: Up to three months after the call closure
Signature of sub-grant agreement: Up to one month after the announcement of the final list of selected projects
Projects duration: 9 months
- Open Call #4: Multi chains support for NGI protocols (active)
Call announcement: 15 May 2024
Call closure and submission deadline: 17 July 2024 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 November 2024 to July 2025 (9 months)
- Open Call #3: Economics and Democracy (closed)
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 #5 welcomes applications that will clearly define, upgrade/extend the state-of-the-art, and develop the following types of solutions:
The objective of the Open Call #5 is to employ digital identities, trustworthy data, and already designed novel mechanisms for the ecosystems’ economy, in order to achieve high energy efficiency and optimisation of particular DLTs. We 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.
Innovative projects should implement techniques such as:
- Develop Energy-Efficient Consensus Mechanisms: Design and implement consensus mechanisms that reduce energy consumption, potentially moving away from Proof of Work (PoW), while ensuring the security and trustworthiness of DLT systems.
- Introduce Sharding for Scalable Decentralization: Implement sharding techniques to divide the network into smaller, energy-efficient groups of maintainers, drastically lowering energy usage while maintaining the security and integrity of the entire DLT network.
- Optimize Data Management for Energy Reduction: Explore methods for secure data removal to reduce the storage demands of DLTs, allowing for the safe deletion of obsolete data while maintaining the integrity and reliability of the ledger.
- Enable Consensus-less DLT Functionality: Investigate and implement systems that perform DLT functionalities without requiring communication between miners, eliminating the need for costly consensus protocols and drastically reducing energy consumption.
- Ensure Interoperability and Scalability: Develop solutions that maintain openness and ensure that the optimized DLT systems can seamlessly interact with existing infrastructures, while ensuring scalability to accommodate future growth without increased environmental impact.
- Energy-efficient and interoperable smart oracle solutions: Develop scalable, decentralized oracle solutions that exploit the capabilities of AI/ML, while being energy-efficient, and ensuring the reliability and integrity of real-world data. Interoperability with legacy systems, including legacy identity systems, is important. Also important is investigating the trade-offs between energy efficiency and other performance metrics such as latency and number of oracle nodes.
- Cross-chain bridges: Develop resilient and highly available bridging solutions that support interoperability and the seamless integration of multiple DLT-based ecosystems. These bridges should facilitate state/data/asset exchange, privacy-enabling mechanisms, and digital identities across multiple chains. The solutions can utilize mechanisms such as TEE, reputation, and data aggregation to ensure trust while increasing energy efficiency.
Applications should cover the real needs of the end-users in one specific sector such as banking, education, healthcare, or e-government.
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. It means that funds received by call winners are Horizon Europe funds.
Open Call - Eligibility
Applicants can apply as individuals or linked to a legal entity. Hence, the participation is possible in several ways:
- Team of natural persons: 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. It can be universities, research centres, NGOs, foundations, micro, small and medium sized enterprises (see definition of SME according to the 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:
- Participating organisations should not have been declared bankrupt or have initiated bankruptcy procedures.
- Organisations or individuals (team of natural persons) applying should not have convictions for fraudulent behaviour, other financial irregularities, and
unethical or illegal business practices.
Check the Guide for Applicants (Open Call #5) for more details.
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.
Third parties’ funds under TrustChain Open Calls come from the Horizon Programme. This means the Horizon Programme regulation will apply to these funds as well. If you get additional public funding from other entities it will be your responsibility to assure the compatibility of the different sources of funding whether you are a legal entity or a natural person.
Open Call - Participation
The F6S platform is the entry point for all proposals at Open Call #5 – TrustChain (ngi.eu). Submissions received by any other channel will be automatically discarded.
Remember to read the Guide for Applicants to get all the information you need to apply successfully.
Open Calls are competitive and applicants should focus on one specific topic, so TrustChain consortium recommends you to submit one application per call, whether you are a legal entity and/ or a team of natural persons. In the event of multiple submissions, only the last one received (timestamp of the F6S system) will be considered for the evaluation process. Any other submitted proposals involving the same applicant will be declared non-eligible and will not be evaluated in any case.
Yes, you can. However, note that the maximum funding eligible per third party within the TrustChain project is limited to €200,000.
Open Call #5 is open until 15 January 2025 at 17:00 (CEST).
Each eligible application will be evaluated by a set of two independent experts, following three main criteria:
- Excellence and innovation (40% weighting);
- Expected impact and value for money (30% weighting);
- Project implementation (30% weighting).
Applications must submit the following documents:
- Application form: administrative questions to be completed directly in the F6S platform. In addition, some general questions for statistical purposes and tick boxes to be clicked by third parties confirming they have read and agree with the conditions defined in this document.
- Proposal description: document format containing the description of the project. In addition, the Annex E: Additional Applicant(s) Template has to be uploaded in case that more than 3 applicants participate as individuals (natural persons) or/and more than 3 applicants participate as organisations (legal entities) filled with the information about the applicant(s) that do not fit in the application form.
The Evaluation & Selection phase is expected to take place until 3 months after the call closure (Open Call #5 deadline: 15 January 2025 at 17:00 CEST).
Open Call - Evaluation Process
The evaluation of the applications is carried out by the TrustChain consortium with the assistance of independent experts. TrustChain consortium members ensure the process is fair and in line with the principles contained in the European Commission’s rules on Proposal submission and evaluation. Experts perform evaluations on a personal basis, not as representatives of their employer, their country or any other entity. Each proposal is evaluated by a set of two experts according to the following criteria:
- Excellence and innovation (40% weighting)
- Expected impact and value for money (30% weighting)
- Project Implementation (30% weighting)
The evaluation of applications is carried out by the TrustChain consortium with the assistance of independent evaluators. The independent evaluators are experts with various expertise related to the TrustChain project. Experts are required to be independent, impartial and objective, and to behave throughout the evaluation process in a professional manner. They sign an expert contract, including a declaration of confidentiality and absence of conflict of interest, before beginning their work.
Granted Projects
Payments will be done in 3 instalments based on concrete results (one pre-financing, an interim payment, and one final payment). The 2K € extra funding will be provided in case the project outcome results in a peer reviewed journal publication with a minimum impact factor of 2.5.
A detailed evaluation process is described in TRUSTCHAIN Open Call 5 Guide for Applicants.
- Beginning of the implementation and pre-financing:
During the first weeks of the project implementation, each team will define with their coaches a set of clear and objective KPIs to be achieved and linked with the funding. These KPIs are different for each team and are related to the solution to be implemented. They will help measure the project progress, but also the commitment and involvement of the third party innovator (i.e., their consistency in attending periodic call meetings with the coaches, meeting the deadlines for reporting, among other criteria). After the definition of the KPIs, a pre-financing of 40% of the sub-grant amount will be released.
- First midterm review and second instalment:
At first midterm of the project implementation, the coaches will assess the KPI’s percentage of execution of the project based on the evaluation of the deliverable D2. A 100% completion of the KPIs for the related period will unlock the total of the 2nd payment which is 30% of the total sub-grant amount. A lower completion of the tasks will launch the proportional payment. If the KPIs for the related period are met by less than 50%, the payment will be retained until the KPIs for the period are assessed as completely reached. If less than 25%, the third-party innovators will be automatically disqualified from the process.
- Final review and final payment:
At the end of the project implementation, third parties will be paid according to their overall completion of KPIs materialised by the deliverable D3, D4. A final event will be used to evaluate third parties on a face-to-face pitch contest. The third parties will present their implemented solution, and their business plan in the context of TrustChain. A panel of evaluators consisting of the TrustChain Consortium and Advisory Board members, will assess the third-party innovators to release the final payment (remaining 30% of the sub-grant amount). In the case of an underperformance below 25%, the team will be disqualified, and no further payment will be released.
According to the minimis regulation (EC No 1998/2006), TrustChain is not a State Aid and therefore the funding does not count as minimis grant.
Payments will be done based on concrete results, and not in financial execution. However, your costs and funding breakdown will be required to ensure that the funding is used for the right purpose, as well as for traceability and accountability.
Subcontracting is not encouraged. The general rule applicable to the TrustChain project is that beneficiaries must have the appropriate resources to implement the full set of tasks needed within the project. This means it is not allowed to subcontract key parts of the project.
Examples (not restricted to) of subcontracting not desired are, as follows:
- paying an external developer not in the company to develop technical tasks;
- paying a research centre or foundation to execute technical tasks;
- Among others.
Note: Employees of a company are never considered subcontractors but as part of the company resources.
Examples (not restricted to) of subcontracting activities that could be appropriate if needed are legal services and/ or design services.
The subcontracting amount should not represent a relevant amount of the total budget and should be justified on the submitted proposal.
If you participate as a team of individuals, you have to stick to the initial team members. Only new members can be added to improve the overall team, but not to change it.
If you are participating as an entity, you are free to add new employees from the firm to the team.
