Interview with Sebastian Haas, DAO4HS project coordinator as Co-founder and President of Hinterland Systems Association:
Can you briefly present your team?
Our nine-person co-founding team at Hinterland Systems Association is a mission-driven collaboration building the first Data Altruism Organisation for regenerative land use in Europe. I am an ecological economic geographer and project coordinator, working closely with my partner Dr. Christoph Fabianek, Chairman of OwnYourData and maintainer of DAO4HS’ strategic technical building blocks. At Hinterland Systems we unite developers, scientific knowledge workers, grazing and agroforestry practitioners, and impact entrepreneurs with expertise in decentralised identity, consent governance, geospatial data and EU data policy around one goal: bringing EU data innovation into the land-use sector.
How did you come up with this project idea and what benefits will it bring to the end users?
We developed DAO4HS as a mission-driven, decentralised transparency system that turns existing land-use data into a shared resource for regional regeneration. Our key assumption is that many actors already collect detailed data for bureaucracy or their own management, and are intrinsically motivated to contribute it if they can do so under trusted, privacy-preserving conditions and for clear public benefit.
We were responding to a paradox: the EU needs granular land-use data for biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate goals, but farmers and regional actors lack suitable infrastructure to share such data with low entry barriers and strong consent governance. For end users like farmers, authorities and researchers, DAO4HS therefore delivers decision support, streamlined compliance, and access to harmonised, high-quality land-use datasets that are shared and reused under explicit altruistic purposes.
How is TrustChain supporting your growth and what role does it play for the next steps in your development?
TrustChain is supporting our growth by funding the implementation and validation of the full DAO4HS architecture: the data intermediation frontend and backend, our data models, OYDID identity, consent reasoning, the Landuser WebApp and key data-usage service integrations, all running on renewable-powered, Kubernetes-based infrastructure. Building on our rigorous energy-efficiency approach, which follows the resource-efficiency requirements of our mission, this foundation enables us to participate in innovation procurement and to work with ambitious municipalities and regions as we scale DAO4HS into real-world deployments.
Why did you apply to the TrustChain call and has your vision changed since then?
We applied to the TrustChain call because its focus on trustworthy decentralised infrastructure and data governance closely matched our ambition to operationalise an EU Data Governance Act-compliant Data Altruism Organisation in the land-use sector. At the time, we saw that consent requirements under the EU Data Governance Act were perceived as prohibitively high, so our goal was to provide open-source building blocks for data intermediation that TrustChain could make available to EU Data Strategy-aligned innovators.
Our vision has not changed, but it has become more concrete: we have evolved from a proof-of-concept into a governance-first federation model with clear regulatory pathways in regenerative land use and European-centred data innovation, including a DAO registration application submitted in Austria. The next step is to bring this framework to the European level through a cross-border association that can support land-use data altruism across multiple EU member states.
What is the most valuable takeout from the TrustChain project and why was the topic of the Open Call important to you/your team?
The most valuable takeout from the TrustChain project is that it allowed us to take conscious decisions to move from abstract technical building blocks to an institutionalised, resilient operational setup for DAO4HS. The Open Call topic was crucial for us because it directly addressed trustworthy decentralised data governance, giving us the space to align our architecture, consent mechanisms and organisational model with the EU Data Governance Act while testing them with real land-use stakeholders. The Open Call topic was effectively made for us, because it enabled us to turn data altruism from an abstract policy concept into working infrastructure for regenerative agriculture, aligned with the Data Governance Act, eIDAS, GDPR and a broad set of EU land-use policies that have been validated as regionally heterogeneous in terms of the ambitions of regional policy actors.
Did you establish collaboration with any of the TrustChain teams or plan for any kind of synergies? If yes, what is the biggest potential in such collaborations?
We have established and planned several synergies with TrustChain and NGI teams: deep technical integration with Sphereon for OID4VC-based wallet workflows, joint experimentation with Convex on on-chain anchoring.
And we bring other open source technologies to the Trustchain ecosystem by proactively integrating relevant data usage scenarios for INSPIRE data innovation with regional high-value data sets and trustworthy GeoAI; the biggest potential lies in combining DAO4HS’ governance layer with these tools to create end-to-end, consented data-to-AI pipelines for land-use decision-making across regions.
What are your expectations regarding the TrustChain software ecosystem and its contribution to the NGI priority areas?
Our expectations for the TrustChain software ecosystem are that it will provide interoperable building blocks – wallets, governance services, energy-efficient data layers – that advance NGI priority areas such as human-centric digital identity, data sovereignty, sustainable infrastructure and trustworthy AI. DAO4HS contributes by delivering open-source, Apache-2.0-licensed data intermediation governance components. The TrustChain Foundation will act as the governance layer of the software ecosystem, ensuring that these interoperable building blocks are stewarded, maintained and evolved in line with European values and regulatory frameworks.
What are the next steps for your team?
The next steps for our team are to obtain formal DGA registration in Austria, to embed the DAO in our regional boundary-spanning process, to complement the DAO’s data-usage capabilities with GeoRAG (geographic retrieval-augmented generation), and to finalise large-scale parcel data pipelines so that regional use cases can scale across our emerging EU-wide data network. In parallel, we will embed cartographic selection and agrobiodiversity-relevant layers into the Landuser WebApp and build a strong, multi-actor consortium for the HORIZON-CL6-2026-01-BIODIV-07 “Boosting agrobiodiversity for food security and sustainable competitiveness” call, targeting communities of practice from pioneering regions and strengthening their regenerative boundary organisations.
What is the message you would give to new and potential applicants to TrustChain Open Calls?
Our message is to start from a clear societal or commercial mission, embrace interoperability and open standards from day one, and treat energy efficiency, privacy and governance as core design constraints rather than add-ons; working closely with other teams, real users as well as regulators throughout the project will not only strengthen your technical outcomes but also position your solution as credible infrastructure for future European initiatives.
