Distributed Ledger Technologies could provide the underpinnings for future growth and resilience across industries and sectors. The stimulus package allocated for post-pandemic recovery represents an unparalleled opportunity to achieve a tech enabled and sustainable Europe.
Despite several studies show that Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies can provide significant benefits to European private and public sectors, decentralization has not yet proven either transformative or disruptive for industry and governments. Significant benefits are expected to materialize from increased efficiency of administrative processes, higher trust in record keeping, procurement, data management and more1.
The European Union acknowledges that intervention and collaboration across stakeholders’ classes is needed – including local governments, early stage investors, entrepreneurs, national or international financiers – in order to harness the potential of this groundbreaking technology. In fact, European investment in DLTs is The EU increasingly falling behind the United States and China, as startups struggle to scale up and private investors perceive the technology as too risky. Nonetheless, the time for decentralization may have come: on one hand, the Covid-19 pandemic boosted demand for secure digital-services across all areas, from supply chain to digital identity; on the other, state authorities are entrusted to deploy sizeable amounts of capital to tackle digitalization.
To achieve the ambitious goal of building a greener, more digital and resilient Europe, it is critical to strengthen the regulatory and financial environment for deep tech, and to facilitate channeling of smart capital into R&D, commercialization and scaling. Including policy priorities, industrial know how, academic knowledge and societal demands in the dialogue on how to adapt traditional infrastructures to the decentralized model is the safe and most agile way to advance in such an uncharted territory.
With the purpose of reinforcing such a dialogue, EBAN hosted a round table on April 15th 2021 bringing together representatives of the quadruple helix model of innovation. The round table clarified current barriers to the widespread adoption of decentralized systems and advanced a set of policy recommendations to facilitate acceptance and investment in Distributed Ledger Technologies.