Open Call 1 (OC1): “Decentralised Digital Identity”

Deadline: 10-Apr-23

TrustChain is calling all developers, innovators, researchers, SMEs and entrepreneurs under Open Call 1 (OC1): “Decentralised Digital Identity”.

Trustworthy digital identities and data are the focus of this TRUSTCHAIN Open Call 1 (OC1) on “Decentralised Digital Identity”. This Open Call 1 welcomes applications that will clearly define, upgrade/extend the state-of-the-art, and develop the following types of solutions:

• Decentralised user-centric identity management framework for supporting an automated privacy preserving, legal and regulatory compliant infrastructure (e.g., GDPR) potentially in alignment with emerging European regulations and standards (i.e. eIDAS).
• Protocols for trustworthiness assessment of entities by means of verifiable credentials and decentralized reputation systems.
• Smart oracles assessing the trustworthiness of data associated with digital identities.
• Inclusive digital identity platforms focusing on marginalized communities (e.g., refugees, elderly, vulnerable).
• Social identity for delegation and recovery that drives community-based trust establishment (i.e., social guardians).
• Systems considering both public and private administration roles in issuing and managing decentralized identifiers.
• Decentralized identity systems supporting Decentralized Authority Organizations (DAOs) Use-case driven identity management system deployment (e.g., banking, publishing, healthcare, education etc).

Objectives

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

Funding Information

• Its indicative budget is € 1 755 000 with up to a maximum of 15 proposals funded.

Phases of the Open CALL #1

• 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. TRUSTCHAIN overall action lasts 36 months, so the selected participants are requested to join at any of the future Joint Meetings even after these 9 months. The goal of this extended participation is knowledge and know-how transfer to TRUSTCHAIN OC2-5 and for the development of the TRUSTCHAIN ecosystem as a whole.

Eligibility Criteria

• 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 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.
    • 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.
  • 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;

Requirements

• Applicants are invited to submit their proposals on any topic that serves the overall TRUSTCHAIN OC1 vision and objectives. Their proposed solution should consider as minimal requirement to:
  • Use standard technology for full stack development;
  • Be open source;
  • Extends the state-of-the-art in the domain of digital identities, and/or solves existing real-world problems with digital identities and provides new highly usable software solutions.

For more information, visit OC1.