Europe Takes Serious Steps Towards Blockchain Adoption

After months of monitoring and observing the "Promising and challenging" potential of distributed ledger technology, the European Union is finally making a turn into the blockchain industry.

How it all startedBack in February 2018, the European Commission launched the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum, aimed to support European cross-border engagement with the technology and its multiple stakeholders and to unite the economy around blockchain.

The positive view within the document toward the blockchain industry in Europe is based on several crucial facts: The EC is liberalizing the industry's regulation and it creates a new task force entrusted with blockchain expertise.

Another move toward blockchain was made in October this year when the European Parliament formed a resolution titled "Distributed ledger technologies and blockchains: building trust with disintermediation." The resolution states that DLT "Could potentially affect all sectors of the economy," but it focuses on several important spheres: finances, health care, transport, education, copyrights, public governance, data protection, and some others.

My Health My Data, the EU-funded project, has been aimed "To use blockchain technology to enable medical data to be stored and transmitted safely and effectively." The resolution signed in October highlighted that blockchain would "Improve data efficiency and the reporting of clinical trials in the health sector, allowing digital data exchange across public and private institutions under the control of the citizens/patients."

For the EU, the main focus of the implementation of blockchain technology is on the protection of personal data, which gives "People more control over how they store, manage and use personal data generated online," says DECODE, another blockchain project funded by the EU. According to the document, blockchain "Should protect the privacy of sensitive health data" and allow "Citizens to control their health data and benefit from transparency thereon, and to choose which data to share, also with regard to their use by insurance companies and the wider health care ecosystem."

One of them is, definitely, the significance of the blockchain technology in financial intermediation by "Improving transparency and reducing transaction costs and hidden costs by better managing data and streamlining processes."

How bright is the blockchain future in Europe?Meanwhile, the Distributed ledger technologies and blockchains resolution has more political significance than legal, as the EC is not required to do anything in response to these requests.

It is aimed to help the EU "Shape the global agenda" on blockchain by providing education on the technology's potential and by developing "Smart regulation" of the blockchain industry.

Switzerland is another European country, but not a member state, that has friendly regulation on the blockchain and crypto industries.