D4.5 Blockchain/DLT Standardisation Policy Roadmap (preliminary)

Standardisation and standards are significant drivers for economic growth2 and also recognized instruments to address specific economic challenges.

Increased economic and system competition puts the EU and also its values under pressure. These significant current changes in the geopolitical environment call for not only keeping the current but even having a stronger EU presence in international standardisation committees (see European Commission, 2022).

Focusing on blockchain is an important aspect in this context. By creating trust in data in ways that were not possible before, blockchain has the potential to revolutionise how we share infor-mation and carry out transactions online. The European Commission's Blockchain Strategy (Eu-ropean Commission, 2023) under the responsibility of the Directorate-General for Communica-tions Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) is designed to meet these goals, partic-ularly in terms of trust, transparency, and decentralization (see European Commission, 2023a). For this reason, DG CONNECT is also one of the key addressees of this roadmap, together with the European standardisation organisations (ESOs).

As written in SEEBLOCKS.eu’s Grant Agreement, the roadmap is produced with support from the experts engaged during the project duration and aims to direct future efforts of reinforcing Eu-ropean values, ethics and policies in eight topic areas.

The twenty needs for standardisation and eight needs for policy measures shown in the tables of this document are key results of SEEBLOCKS.eu’s public consultation and central action items of this roadmap.

The topics are categorised according to short, medium and long-term priorities and assigned to the responsibility of various stakeholders. Despite these different responsibilities, the list of short-term priorities is currently quite long. For this reason, the finalisation of the roadmap will also examine the extent to which some short-term priorities would be better considered at a later date to make optimum use of the available resources of the respective stakeholders.

The roadmap’s finalisation, added by the formulation of first milestones is subject to the second version of this report that shall be completed in late spring 2025.