TRUSTCHAIN Open Call 1 on Decentralised Digital Identity

Calling all developers, innovators, researchers, SMEs and entrepreneurs!
€ 1,755, 000 will be distributed among (up to) 15 selected projects!

Trustworthy digital identities that also preserve privacy, in the sense that specific parts of the user identity are only exposed, are currently needed. Also, before data can be employed in blockchain smart contracts, data trustworthiness assessment is a prerequisite for online transactions.

In order to achieve TRUSTCHAIN vision, it is expected that applicants will develop interoperable and sustainable digital identity management applications that are transparent and address the needs of the future decentralised internet.

In particular, the following main objectives should be considered:

Develop a framework for decentralized user-centric identity management that lies in the scope of the call and addresses the stated challenges below;
Develop protocols for trustworthiness of entities by means of verifiable credentials and decentralized reputation systems;
To ensure identity attributes are disclosed only with the informed consent from the data owner (i.e., data minimization requirement of GDPR);
Develop smart oracles to assess the trustworthiness of data fed to blockchain smart-contracts fetched from external systems.

Applications should cover real needs of the end-users in one of the sectors such as for example banking, education, healthcare or e-democracy.

In order to develop a usable and interoperable decentralised future internet, some of the identity challenges that exist today need to be addressed.

These include:

The current identity systems lack usability, privacy, transparency, interoperability and compliant with GDPR and is not inclusive in nature;
It incorporates multitude of technologies such as zero-knowledge-proof (ZKP) that are not transparent to the user and not easy to integrate or deploy by the non-tech-savvy user;
There is a lack of trust in the way the identity credentials are shared and used by multiple online services;
Most of the authentication systems request more identity data than what is required. Hence the data minimization principle of GDPR is not observed correctly;
Most of the existing identity systems do not provide a mechanism by which an individual can delegate their identity credentials to someone they trust for identity recovery or in an emergency scenario (i.e. social guardians);
The systems don’t maintain the privacy of the identity credentials. In addition, the user has no visibility of the audit trail of the identity credentials once shared with a 3rd party. This leads to identity fraud; and,
Human has not been involved from the initial design stages of the identity ecosystem. This leads to lack of understanding of the new technologies (i.e., blockchain, reputation-based systems, crypto etc.) and usability issues by the end-users’ restricting wider technology adoption.

In the 9 months long implementation timeframe for the Open Call, the innovators will receive funding (up to 200 000 €) and support (mentoring and coaching), as well as adequate implementation of the human-centric approach. More specifically, the first two months will be dedicated to the users requirements with the involvement of end users and innovators whereas the last 2 months will be dedicated to testing and validation by early adopters.

Learn more about the TrustChain project.