TRUSTCHAIN OC5 - GREEN SCALABLE AND SUSTAINABLE DLTS

Description

Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), such as blockchain, have been transformative in enabling secure, decentralized systems, but their widespread adoption has led to significant environmental concerns. High electricity consumption, driven by resource-intensive consensus mechanisms like Proof of Work (PoW), the need for widespread transaction verification, and the large amounts of data exchanged across the network contribute to their negative environmental impact. Efforts to reduce this impact must navigate a delicate balance between maintaining decentralization and security while improving energy efficiency. The objective is to optimize DLTs by leveraging digital identities, trustworthy data, and novel economic mechanisms while balancing technological advancement with sustainability. In order to achieve TrustChain vision, it is expected that applicants will employ digital identities, trustworthy data, and already designed novel mechanisms for the ecosystems’economy, in order to achieve high energy efficiency and optimisation of particular DLTs. The development of solutions will prioritize a user-centric approach that emphasizes energy efficiency, trustworthiness, scalability, privacy by design, environmental sustainability, openness, and legal compliance. Innovative projects should implement techniques such as: • Develop Energy-Efficient Consensus Mechanisms: Design and implement consensus mechanisms that reduce energy consumption, potentially moving away from Proof of Work (PoW), while ensuring the security and trustworthiness of DLT systems. • Introduce Sharding for Scalable Decentralization: Implement sharding techniques to divide the network into smaller, energy-efficient groups of maintainers, drastically lowering energy usage while maintaining the security and integrity of the entire DLT network. These techniques could be related or employ DePIN incentive mechanisms and approaches. • Optimize Data Management for Energy Reduction: Explore methods for secure data removal to reduce the storage demands of DLTs, allowing for the safe deletion of obsolete data while maintaining the integrity and reliability of the ledger. • Enable Consensus-less DLT Functionality: Investigate and implement systems that perform DLT functionalities without requiring communication between miners, eliminating the need for costly consensus protocols and drastically reducing energy consumption. • Ensure Interoperability and Scalability: Develop solutions that maintain openness and ensure that the optimized DLT systems can seamlessly interact with existing infrastructures, while ensuring scalability to accommodate future growth without increased environmental impact. Moreover, innovative DePIN solutions that enable scalability and sustainability are envisioned. • Energy-efficient and interoperable smart oracle solutions: Develop scalable, decentralized oracle solutions that exploit the capabilities of AI/ML, while being energy-efficient, and ensuring the reliability and integrity of real-world data. Interoperability with legacy systems, including legacy identity systems, is important. Also important is investigating the trade-offs between energy efficiency and other performance metrics such as latency and number of oracle nodes. • Energy-efficient Trusted Enclaves: Develop solutions and mechanisms towards energy-efficient trusted enclaves, potentially involving secure decentralized processing, secure multiparty computation, ZKP-based analytics, etc. • Energy-efficient Cross-chain bridges: Develop resilient and highly available bridging solutions that support interoperability and the seamless integration of multiple DLT-based ecosystems. These bridges should facilitate state/data/asset exchange, privacy-enabling mechanisms, and digital identities across multiple chains. The solutions can utilize mechanisms such as TEE, reputation, and data aggregation to ensure trust while increasing energy efficiency. • Energy-efficiency applications: Develop applications that make use of decentralized technologies and significantly impact energy efficiency, circular economy and sustainability, token strategies for sustainability, e.g., green certificates, digital product passports, etc. • Embedding and embodying philosophical concepts of indigenous populations that can be used to achieve sustainability and trustworthiness in the context of climate change are also possible, also related to 5Cs2 for sustainability, i.e., consciousness, Conservation, Community, Commerce, Culture. Examples of applications may include, for example, but not limited to the DestinE (Destination Earth) programme. To develop such mechanisms, Applicants are requested to addressed current challenges: • Energy-Intensive Consensus Mechanisms: Reducing the energy usage of consensus protocols like Proof of Work without compromising system security and integrity between nodes. Develop consensus mechanisms that combine the features of traditional energy-efficient consensus mechanisms with the ability to interpret and agree on the meaning of complex data. This approach can significantly reduce the energy consumption of blockchain networks while ensuring that nodes reach consensus not just on transactions, but on the contextual understanding of external data. • Trustworthiness vs. Efficiency Trade-off: Maintaining high levels of decentralization to ensure trust and democratic control, while reducing the number of participating nodes to lower energy consumption. • Onchain/offchain Data Management and Transmission: Reducing the volume of data stored and transmitted across the network to decrease energy demands without compromising the accuracy, integrity, or trustworthiness of the information. • Integration of Digital Identities: Implementing digital identities to streamline processes and improve trust without undermining the privacy or security of the decentralized system. • Compatibility with Existing DLT Infrastructure: Ensuring that novel mechanisms designed for energy efficiency and sustainability can integrate smoothly with existing DLT systems without disrupting their functionality or scalability. • Oracles and Cross-chain Bridges: Energy efficient, secure, trusted, and privacy-preserving data processing technologies based on smart oracles for interfacing with the real world and bridges for interconnecting different chains. • Oracles for green certificates: Automating the issuance, tracking, and verification of green certificates, such as Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). By ensuring secure and tamper-proof data integration, decentralized oracles enhance the transparency and reliability of green certificates, enabling more efficient trading and preventing fraud in renewable energy markets. • Energy-efficient Trusted Enclaves: Energy-efficient Trusted execution environments, secure decentralized processing, secure multiparty computation, ZKP-based analytics, etc. • Energy-efficient DePINs: Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks collectively achieve to extend the physical infrastructure towards higher availability, higher coverage and lower marginal costs. However, emerging DePIN infrastructures are not always energy- efficient or cost-effective as a whole. • Token strategies for sustainable goals: Appropriate incentives for sustainable goals may be provided by solutions involving innovative cryptos, tokens, tokenomics, and token strategies. • Balance between privacy and sustainability: it is known that the mechanisms known as PETs, which are applied to provide a layer of privacy to users are, in general, of high energy consumption. Teams must find solutions that optimize their use, applying each mechanism only when strictly necessary, always trying to find the most efficient solution at all times. • Adaptation to the Circular Economy and waste reduction: solutions must minimize the use of materials that generate waste or that are not recyclable. This challenge involves designing solutions that use renewable resources and consider the reuse and recycling of components, thus contributing to the circular economy. • Efficient use of underutilized resources: applicants should design solutions that utilize existing compute or storage infrastructure during periods of low activity. The challenge lies in developing mechanisms to automatically detect when infrastructures are in a low usage state and redirect processes to those resources without interrupting other operations. Applications should cover real needs of the end-users in one a specific sector such as for example banking, education, healthcare, or e-government. A user centric design approach should frame the development of these solutions.

Beneficiary & submission

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 TrustChain Consortium and TrustChain Advisory Board Members.

Further information

Further details are available at: https://trustchain.ngi.eu/apply