- IOTA recently completed the European Blockchain Pre-Commercial Procurement as one of three finalists from an initial pool of seven selected back in 2021.
- Its products impacted digital passports and IP rights management and will be integrated into the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure.
IOTA’s appeal in the real world continues to grow, with a rising number of projects and partnerships with non-blockchain institutions showing that it’s not a niche network. In the latest development, the IOTA Foundation announced that it had successfully completed the third and final phase of the European Blockchain Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP).
IOTA was first selected in 2021 as one of the seven successful applicants from a pool of more than 30 hopefuls for the project that was funded by the European Commission. The Commission is targeting new blockchain solutions for the region. IOTA was picked alongside Chromaway and Billon for this third phase—the former is the company behind the Chromia relational blockchain. At the same time, the latter’s network targets asset tokenization and on-chain document storage.
The successful applications from the project will be integrated into the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure, the first public sector blockchain infrastructure in Europe that launched in 2018.
As part of the project, IOTA developed a core solution that combines its Tangle DLT with open APIs and third-party platforms. It consists of a core DLT layer and satellite systems.
The former is built on Stardust, the new programmable version of the Tangle. It uses a decentralized coordinator and relies on a proof-of-authority consensus mechanism distributed among the EU member states. Satellite systems, on the other hand, link other third-party platforms through the IOTA-EBSI connectors.
From this core offering, IOTA has developed three solution prototypes for the PCP, as we reported:
- A digital product passport for electronics that manages the lifecycle of electronic products along the supply chain and even in recycling.
- A similar digital product passport for plastics to tackle the global scourge of plastic waste, specifically targeting agroplastics.
- An intellectual property rights management solution that relies on smart contracts to give creators ownership of their content and facilitate royalty payments.
IOTA Showcases Scalability, Sustainability, Security
The project tested some of the qualities the European Commission deems critical in a regional network. and IOTA was flawless in all.
They included scalability, with Tangle subjected to adverse conditions to test whether it can scale to handle the transactions of a region that’s home to over 400 million people. The testing phase involved 100 nodes in 12 geographical regions and 30 full entities to represent each member of the EU. The IOTA Foundation revealed that its system hit 90,000 transactions per second consistently.
Sustainability is an important facet of the European Commission’s roadmap for the region. IOTA proved to the Commission that its system’s energy consumption scales logarithmically and that one transaction on its Stardust Tangle consumes less energy than Hyperledger Besu, the network that currently underpins the Commission’s EBSI.
Europe has always been big on privacy, and IOTA proved that its system is aligned with all regional security and privacy standards.
After passing this stage, IOTA’s system is set to go into a pilot stage with the EBSI “with a focus on having a complete set of functionalities. This sandbox is available for the EU member state authorities and EBSI projects to experiment with.”
