European Self Sovereign Identity Framework Laboratory

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) promises to empower European citizens with new means to manage privacy, to eliminate logins, and to enjoy much faster and safer electronic transactions via the internet as well as in real life. SSI promises to empower European organisations to speed up, secure and automate transactions with customers, suppliers and partners, resulting in tens of billions of euros savings annually on administrative costs in Europe. SSI promises to drive a new business ecosystem with thousands of new jobs, new job categories and new business opportunities for existing and new European companies. SSI is not a self-fulfilling promise. While so-called SSI ‘solutions’ are popping up all over the world, the vast majority has a local scope, i.e. they solve a problem in a specific domain, they do not scale (at every level they need to, e.g. at the technical, process, information and business levels), and scarcely interoperate. Addressing these issues is a top priority for the eSSIF-Lab project. eSSIF-Lab (European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework Laboratory) is a lab-to-market project for ICT-24 subtopic 1-b “strengthening internet trustworthiness with electronic identities”, that facilitates the further development, integration and adoption of SSI technologies through a cascade funding approach targeting innovative companies developing SSI based solutions. eSSIF-Lab is championed by leading experts in SSI technologies, cascade funding, business acceleration and continuous deployment of open-source software. eSSIF-Lab will award 62 subgrants in 2 types of open calls, 1 targeting technical enhancements and extensions of the SSI framework (20 subgrants, for SMEs, startups, self-employed individuals, academic innovators, and innovators from larger organisations), and 2 targeting SSI business and social innovations and applications (42 subgrants, for SMEs and startups). The project will provide business and technical support to integrate SSI technology with market propositions, and to accelerate SSI-related businesses and social applications. The outreach though the open calls and the prominent position in the emerging SSI community will enable the eSSIF-Lab consortium to advance the broad uptake of SSI as a next generation open and trusted digital identity solution.