The European Union has introduced the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC), a new entity that aims to focus on promoting blockchain policy in order to move Europe’s “digital decade” forward in a meaningful manner.
The EDIC should become operational towards the end of 2024 and will reportedly have the power to support blockchain/DLT policy while competing with similar Chinese and Latin American (LatAm) initiatives.
The EU’s blockchain is expected to integrate public applications that work with online wallets, digital identities, storing various licenses, as well as tracking and tracing goods in supply chains.
Private applications should be able to develop solutions on the EU blockchain in the foreseeable future.
There are certain questions regarding whether the European Union and other jurisdictions may effectively scale their blockchain networks to the levels needed without having to deal with legal issues with blockchain firms such as nChain.
Governments are now increasingly embracing blockchain/DLT in a major way, with China’s Blockchain-based Service Network, Latin America’s Lacchain, as well as the European Union’s EDIC.
Some industry professionals think that all blockchains will eventually converge into a single platform/ecosystem. However, this is far from being realistic or practical, because different types of blockchains, for instance, permissioned (or private) and permissionless (or public) tend to perform completely different functions.
What’s more likely to happen is we will see the emergence of many new blockchain interoperability protocols. This will allow fundamentally different DLT networks to communicate (exchange data/information and tokens) with each other in an efficient manner, whenever it is required.
It’s also worth noting that the Blockchain is simply a data structure that was invented by Dr. Stuart Haber and his colleagues in the early 1990s, and it was meant for digital document time-stamping. And then in 2008, the blockchain data structure was referenced in the Bitcoin whitepaper, which was authored by the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin (BTC), Satoshi Nakamoto.