Blockchain and DLTs have a limitless potential for use cases across all industries. They streamline business processes and offers a great potential for reducing costs and complexity, offering high level of transparency and trustworthiness. Despite of the potential benefits, their uptake is low, even more among the SMEs, making the transition to DLTs slow and arduous due to: -Sectors in which DLTs make sense, besides fintech, are those in which existing traditional SMEs do not have enough knowledge on how DLTs work nor their potential uptake. -Traditional SMEs (and stakeholders in general) need to be sensitized to uptake the technology in their verticals. Lack of knowledge makes them reluctant to technological changes. -A regulatory framework should foster the uptake and prevent from fraudulent actions. Uncertain regulation limits companies’ scope of action and imply a risk for their growth. To overcome it, BLOCKCHERS’ concept aims at: -funding up to 30 tech-based SMEs in 2 open calls, providing real use cases implementation engaging at least 30 traditional SMEs (end users uptaking DLTs with a technology provider) -providing training, team work sessions and community building activities, to achieve a better understanding and acceptance of DLTs among SMEs. -mapping & monitoring relevant initiatives to build a community to solve the information gap between regulators and DLT developers, providing recommendations for policy action as a way to create a smart regulation in the EU. 4 top-skilled organisations gather to address these challenges: ZABALA, coordinator and expert on cascade-funding and innovation services provision to SMEs EU-wide. Innomine, expert on acceleration and piloting/use cases in the CEE market for the DIHs. Frankfurt School Blockchain Center (FSBC), recognized expert on providing DLTs training and organizing major events on blockchain. Alastria, the first public-permissioned Spanish DLT network promoted by corporations, available for BLOCKCHERS.

Trust is essential to societies, and blockchain has the potential to shift trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. This view is in line with the recent emergence of less centralised paradigms for trust, that can offer concepts and techniques for efficiently operating large volumes of socially connected subjects, for example, peer-to-peer networking and the move from institutional and intermediary trust to modern era decentralised trust relying on technology. Decentralised architectures are much more appropriate for clustering subjects (users) and objects (e.g. media items) into communities and for maintaining social relationships. It is the main vision of the TreBlo project to nurture and facilitate beyond the state-of-the-art research on blockchain technology which will lead to more scalable blockchain based solutions and applications. The latter will contribute to ensuring the exchange of trustworthy and reliable content on social networks and media. To achieve this, the project will implement a series of open calls that will target academic and R&D companies research teams. They are invited to define and implement small scale research projects on two related use cases, obtaining technical and business support services from TreBlo: - Use case 1: Trust and reputation models on blockchains. This targets innovative applications, technologies, technical approaches and methodologies that increase the levels of trust in blockchain-based information exchange, with emphasis on user generated content on the Internet and social media, considering also data from IoT infrastructures. - Use case 2: Proof-of-validity and proof-of-location. The focus is on innovative mechanisms to increase transparency and trustworthiness of user generated genuine content. The users, as being part of a blockchain, can apply additional verification mechanisms to increase transparency, validity and high level of trustworthiness, such as Proof- of-Location and Proof-of Validity.

The overall objective of TrustChain is to create a portfolio of Next Generation Internet protocols and an ecosystem of decentralised software solutions that reach the highest standards of humanity such as those chartered by the United Nations including the respect of human rights, ethics, sustainability, energy efficiency, our care for the environment and our respect for the World’s cultural history. TrustChain will tackle several challenges pertaining to trustworthy and reliable digital identity, to resilient, secure and reliable data pathways, to economics and trading of data, to energy efficiency for data storage, transport and sharing, to seamless services and data flows. A new trustworthy data governance and sharing model in line with the European regulatory framework and taking into account European values will be developed that will ensure Trusted Data Ecosystems. Third party top Internet innovators will be selected through 5 open calls focus on topics of the (1) Decentralised digital identity, (2) the User privacy and data governance, (3) Economics and democracy, (4) Multi chains support for NGI protocols, and (5) Green scalable and sustainable DLTs, which is an essential need of the day. TrustChain addresses the second research area of the Human 01-03 call in particular to tackle the current limitations of decentralised technologies, such as Blockchain and DLT, including those related to scalability, interoperability, energy efficiency, privacy or security, in order to make them dependable building blocks of the future Internet. TrustChain will explore DLT-based solutions, enabling the exploitation of data coming from a high number and various types of sources, eliminating data silos through decentralised and interoperable approaches, while helping individuals and organisations better govern their data when they participate in joint value chains where cooperating partners can also be competitors.

CIRCULOOS aims to deliver circular manufacturing tools which orchestrate and continuously optimise the supply-chain end-to-end and comprehensively integrate planning and execution. Combining these with direct calculation of the product sustainability and circularity profile, both internally and with external partners, this environment will enable them to configure and execute disruptive circular manufacturing processes for sustainable production that cover the entire life cycle of products which become waste and are recycled in the same or other life cycles. To achieve this objective the project aims at deploying: Circular end-to-end supply chain orchestration of collaborative workflows and connecting planning and execution metrics with advanced and multimodal visualisation -DT of supply chains formulated, factory processes and product design- and analytics. Supply Chain Optimisation that monitors the global (across the supply chain) and local (within the factory) processes and execution. Dynamic Sustainability Assessment functionalities that ponder the alternative supply-chain scenarios (varying in terms of materials used, processing technologies, suppliers involved and/or activated circular economy practices). Supply Chain Data Spaces for seamless, multi-level data flow across the supply chain partners. Cybersecure and trustworthy data sharing across the supply chain by employing a distributed, trusted and efficient Identity and Access management system together with the associated trust framework. Novel circular business processes will be demonstrated supporting reusing, reducing, and recycling material in production and consumption systems. Skills upskilling and reskilling will be provided in RAMP and through online courses.