The Iota Foundation, which oversees developments in the namesake Internet-of-Things transactions blockchain has announced that it had been selected as one of five contractors by the European Commission to develop blockchain and distributed ledger technology in the region.
Based on the announcement, phase 2A seeks to advance European Blockchain Services Infrastructure in the following five areas:
- Investigate the feasibility of sharding as to exponentially scale the Iota network on EBSI.
- Develop an approval weight consensus mechanism that will be highly flexible and allow both permissionless and permissioned use cases.
- Ensure any Iota-based solution for cross-border transfers abides by EBSI governance structures.
- Integrate its GDPR-compliant identity solution with the new framework for EU digital identity.
- Prepare on and off-chain bridges to other protocols in and outside EBSI.
Based on the results of the phase 2A development over the next six months, a minimum of three out of five contractors will be chosen to advance to the next stage, where the European Commission will field-test the capabilities of the newly developed infrastructure and applications.
