EBSI-VECTOR - EBSI enabled VErifiable Credentials & Trusted Organisations Registries

The Digital Europe project «EBSI-VECTOR» that started on June 1st, 2023, with a term of two years, has launched its official Kick-Off Meeting on July 5th 2023. This project is the result of the unique historical moment that we are living, where digital transformation represents a step forward from the merely adoption of any enabling technologies towards a process guided by a strategy of revisiting and redesigning existing ways of living, working, doing business and managing public good.

Hence, digital transformation is pushing governmental entities towards an open, transparent, citizen-centred, decentralised, multi provider and co-operative model that can be supported by cutting-edge blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (so-called DLTs). Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger, that organizes data into blocks, and they are chained together in an append – only mode, meaning data can only be added in time-ordered sequential order. Furthermore, distributed ledgers use independent computers (so-called nodes) to record, share and synchronize transactions in their respective (decentralized) electronic ledgers.

The blockchain technology currently sits within the innovators and the early adopter user groups (e.g., citizens, students, etc.). EBSI stands for European Blockchain Services Infrastructure, is the first EU-wide blockchain infrastructure, and several national initiatives are moving towards the overcoming of "Proof of Concept" stage, to accelerate the creation of cross-border services and put blockchain at the service of public administrations for the purpose of verifying information, increase efficiency and making the services trustworthy.

Blockchain becoming fully operational

In this frame EBSI-VECTOR aims to support in an organized and coordinated way a series of activities aimed at reducing the gap between a "pre-production" implementation and a real-life production adoption in specific application sectors. In particular, the project overarching vision is to "Improve the capabilities of social security, educational credentials and ESSIF use cases, extending the paradigm of self-sovereignty, and decentralized verifiable credentials and decentralized trusted registries for each use case related with real end user services for European citizens via the support of the European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI) and implement this in different countries and cross-border interactions". EBSI-VECTOR will also inspire and support the EUDI development with the elaboration of current and new EBSI-capabilities and engaging more stakeholders and actors in the decentralized identity ecosystem.

Demonstration in three relevant use cases

The potential behind EBSI VECTOR will be demonstrated through the following use cases that will be developed and deployed in a cross-border context.

• Education: use case learning outcomes achievements, use case transcript of records and use case student ID. 
• Social Security: use case European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) and use case Portable Document PDA1.
• Business registries: use case identity of legal persons deployed with selected partners.

Consortium:

More than 50 partners from 20 countries

The EBSI VECTOR consortium, therefore, consists of a well-balanced but extraordinary large group of partners that make the implementation of verifiable credentials in the education and social security domain possible and extend the current capabilities for further uptake. The collaboration between the public sector organisations from the European Blockchain Partnership (which explored the verifiable credentials and decentralised registries in the past three years) with the business domain experts and policy advisors of education and social security (actively engaged in different use case groups and related projects) supplemented with academic and technical experts (most of them already provide EBSI compliant solutions and with lots of development and design experience) is the best guarantee to achieve the objectives of this project. This consortium widely represents Europe including partners from Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and The Netherlands.

Website: https://www.ebsi-vector.eu/

Project co-funded by the European Union under the Digital Europe Programme under Grant Agreement n° 101102512. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.