The European Commission recently launched phase two of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure, EBSI, which intends to use distributed ledger technology to meet the EU’s climate targets. The project’s latest phase targets a convergence of EU digital and green initiatives with the creation of digital product passports, viewed as critical for developing and sustaining the circular economy.

Goldman Sachs released this report with the purpose of providing a thorough, balanced and objective examination of the digital asset ecosystem. Such an undertaking was not easy: The technology underlying blockchains is revolutionary, complex and rapidly evolving. The industry uses new jargon. There is a significant amount of misinformation and disinformation.

Blockchain technology, like many tech developments, was born out of a utopian ideal. It came from a vision for a cashless society that maximized individual autonomy with freedom from oversight and taxation. However, the potential for blockchain to fetter us to a system using our records is innate to a tamper-resistant, extremely durable, and verifiable record. Here, we adopt a contrarian viewpoint and discuss the drawbacks of blockchain technology that come from its strengths rather than its weaknesses. The concern with the scenarios we outline is not that it will come true but that it can.

Telecommunications company Orange has partnered with Polish blockchain company Smartkey to improve access controls to buildings and city services across Poland. Several city governments already use Orange’s IoT platform to remotely manage city services such as street lighting control. The partnership builds upon this technology by integrating Smartkey’s blockchain solution, which ensures that the data from the IoT sensors cannot be falsified after its creation. When combined, the two platforms will enable authorized city residents to gain quicker access to specific buildings and city and commercial services. Eighty cities will participate in the initial rollout.

The privacy of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is facing a major hurdle with outsourcing private health data in the cloud as there exists danger of leaking health information to unauthorized parties. In fact, EHRs are stored on centralized databases that increases the security risk footprint and requires trust in a single authority which cannot effectively protect data from internal attacks. This research focuses on ensuring the patient privacy and data security while sharing the sensitive data across same or different organisations as well as healthcare providers in a distributed environment.

武漢大学の皆さん、たいへんお疲れ様でした。中国のエンジニアが個人データ関連のプラットフォームに取り組んでいるのを見るのは素晴らしいことです。ただ、人間中心にするには、さらに一歩踏み出す必要があります。個人データは医者ではなく、患者自身により完全にコントロールされるべきです。

Good job Wuhan University. It is great to see Chinese engineers working on personal data related platform. However, needed one extra step to become more human-centric. The patient should have the full control not the doctor.

Interesting paper highlighting the different reconfiguration of the notion of privacy taking place under various technical schemes: blockchain, multiparty computation, fully homomorphic encryption, differential privacy