Open call #5 - CLOSED!
Calling all developers, innovators, researchers, SMEs and entrepreneurs! €1.989.000,00 to support up to 17 projects!
The objective of 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. These techniques could be related or employ DePIN incentive mechanisms and approaches.
- 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. Moreover, innovative DePIN solutions that enable scalability and sustainability are envisioned.
- 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.
- Energy-efficient Trusted Enclaves: Develop solutions and mechanisms towards energy-efficient trusted enclaves, potentially involving secure decentralized processing, secure multiparty computation, ZKP-based analytics, etc.
- Energy-efficient 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.
- Energy-efficiency applications: Develop applications that make use of decentralized technologies and significantly impact energy efficiency, circular economy and sustainability, token strategies for sustainability, e.g., green certificates, digital product passports, etc.
Applications should cover the real needs of the end-users in one specific sector such as banking, education, healthcare, or e-government.
Link with other Open Calls: Understanding what digital identity (Open Call #1) is, data owners privacy policies requirements and data governance (Open Call #2), market mechanisms for data exchange and trading, and federated business models (Open Call #3), interoperability across multiple chains (Open Call #4) is prerequisite for designing and implementing innovative and fit for purpose, green, scalable, and sustainable DLTs. Solutions to be developed in this Open Call #5 should consider some of the approaches and outcomes identified in Open Call #1, #2, #3, and #4. Joint activities between Open Call #1, #2, #3, #4, and Open Call #5 innovators will be facilitated by the TrustChain consortium.
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.
- Token strategies for sustainable goals: Appropriate incentives for sustainable goals may be provided by solutions involving innovative cryptos, tokens, tokenomics, and token strategies.
- Balance between privacy and sustainability: it is known that the mechanisms known as PETs, which are applied to provide a layer of privacy to users are, in general, of high energy consumption. Teams must find solutions that optimize their use, applying each mechanism only when strictly necessary, always trying to find the most efficient solution at all times.
- Adaptation to the Circular Economy and waste reduction: solutions must minimize the use of materials that generate waste or that are not recyclable. This challenge involves designing solutions that use renewable resources and consider the reuse and recycling of components, thus contributing to the circular economy.
- Efficient use of underutilized resources: applicants should design solutions that utilize existing compute or storage infrastructure during periods of low activity. The challenge lies in developing mechanisms to automatically detect when infrastructures are in a low usage state and redirect processes to those resources without interrupting other operations.
Phases of the Open CALL #5
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 OC5 and for the development of the TrustChain ecosystem.
HOW TO APPLY?
Open Calls will be handled using the F6S platform.
Applications will be accepted only via F6S platform and submitted before 15 January 2025, 17:00 CET [Brussels time]
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 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 (see subsection 3.2 of Guidelines for Applicants). 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[1];
- 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.
[1] 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 8,775M€.
- The TrustChain Open Call 5
This document is the open call announcement.
- The TrustChain Open Call #5 Guide for applicant
This document provides in detail the information to help apply to the TrustChain Open Call 5 such as an abstract of the TrustChain action, a description of the TrustChain Open Call 5, 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.
- The TrustChain Open Call #5 Application material
- Annex B – Model Sub-grant Agreement – draft template (read only)
- Annex C – Administrative form (read only)
- Annex D – Proposal description template
- Annex E – Additional applicants template
Note: Word templates (Annex D and Annex E) are also available at the F6S Submission System.