Billon picked by EU as a participant for the European Blockchain Pre-Commercial Procurement

Billon is recognized by the selection as one of seven providers to develop innovative blockchain solutions and demonstrate how they could improve the future evolution of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure.

(London/Warsaw, September 9, 2021) The European Commission selected Billon as one of a select group of companies into Phase 1 of the EU blockchain Pre-Commercial Procurement process that aims to pilot and test new innovations that could improve EBSI - the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure. 

EBSI builds on the work of the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP), a cooperation between 29 countries and the European Commission, to deliver cross-border blockchain based services across Europe. The selection of Billon for this phase enables the company to leverage its award-winning Unified Enterprise DLT platform to bring innovation into use cases including cross-border IP rights management and product tracking in the circular economy. 

Billon’s new enterprise platform, developed in part with funding from European grants, unifies the management of three asset classes -- fiat digital cash, documents and non-cash assets -- into a single, high-performance blockchain protocol. This system, with a protocol designed to be eco-friendly as a permissioned network, can manage the complexity of regulatory rules and the performance needs of enterprises. Thus, it solves many of the challenges required for wider adoption of blockchain technologies. 

Billon Group Founder and Chief Technology Officer Andrzej Horoszczak, comments: “It is not enough anymore to provide a distributed network and immutability.  We created functionality at the layer 1 protocol layer to manage the complexities of compliance with regulations, and to be able to scale without the high cost associated with early blockchain architectures.” 

Billon Co-founder Robert Kałuża, comments: “This is an outstanding fit for us. Billon’s clients challenge us to deliver enterprise solutions that solve specific use cases, though on a common platform. We are hitting the ground running.” 

Phase 1 of the project requires Billon to continue R&D within two areas of the wider set of EU-wide cross-border public services, namely:

 

1. Cross-border Intellectual Property Rights Management, Accountability & Trading Platform. When completed, owners, contributors and authors of IP can trace the use of their content in digital media across the EU. Integration with digital national currency tokens, a unique feature, will allow for payment interoperability and ownership change in later stages of the content life cycle.
2. Digital Product Passport & the Circular Economy. The Unified Enterprise DLT System’s document management capabilities can be used to manage the complexity of tracing the life cycle of material goods from raw materials extraction through goods creation, logistics and storage, and finally to trace usage and recycling disposal.

While designing the solutions, Billon will pay special attention to qualities such as scalability to deal with high volume of tokens, security and privacy, and sustainability in order to fit in the EU climate objectives and the European Green Deal. Phase 1 will also focus on the capacity to evolve and address new cyber threats. 

Following Phase 1, around four participants will be selected for Phase 2.

About Billon

Billon created the Unified Enterprise DLT System, the blockchain-based protocol and system that uniquely combines three asset classes - national currency, data, and documents - into a single, high-performance distributed ledger (DLT), meeting regulatory requirements and solving challenges for the wide adoption of blockchain technologies. With the protocol designed for high throughput and low cost of maintenance, our mission is to become the backbone for all kinds of enterprise applications and unleash the transformational capabilities of blockchain in the regulated world. 

Billon provides client services for handling documents and regulated e-money on blockchain. The system also supports clients developing their own enterprise solutions in areas of Trusted Document Management, Regulated Digital Cash and Asset & Data Tokenization.

Billon Group Ltd. was founded in the UK in 2015, following several years of R&D in Poland. Its unique DLT protocol has been supported by many R&D grants, including the EU Horizon 2020 program. Billon subsidiary companies are licensed to issue electronic money by regulators in the UK and Poland. 

Billon’s growing partner list includes leading companies such as FIS, Raiffeisen Bank International and BIK (the Polish credit reporting agency). Billon has offices in London and Warsaw.

For more information, visit www.billongroup.com. Follow Billon Group on LinkedIn & Twitter & Facebook.

About EBSI

Since 2018, 29 countries (All EU Member States, Norway and Lichtenstein) and the European Commission have joined forces to form the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP). They have committed to working together towards realising the potential of blockchain-based services for the benefit of citizens, society and the economy.

The Partnership is building a European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI). Their vision is to leverage blockchain to the creation of cross-border services for public administrations and their ecosystems to verify information and make services trustworthy.

Since 2020, EBSI is deploying a network of distributed blockchain nodes across Europe, supporting applications focused on selected use-cases. EBSI is the first EU-wide blockchain infrastructure, driven by the public sector, in full respect of European values and regulations.