European Parliament and Commission to Debate Blockchain in June

Eva Kaili, a member of the European Parliament. Source: European Parliament/Laurie Dieffembaqo

The Industry Committee of the European Parliament called the EU Commission to propose measures in order to promote blockchains and other Distributed ledger technologies. The matter should be debated during the June plenary session.

Also, MEPs ask for the post-2020 EU long-term budget that is said to be currently under negotiation to include funding for blockchain-based research and projects, a press release from the European Parliament says. Eva Kaili, a member of Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, expressed her expectations of the technology improving the overall quality of life, adding, “Blockchain is a cutting-edge technology and we aspire to make EU the global leader in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The Committee found that “applying the blockchain model to areas like energy use, supply chains and governance would cut costs for firms and empower citizens.”

Also, what the release highlights as a positive use case could very well be argued to be a step towards decentralization: both in what they call democratizing the energy market, by enabling households that produce energy to exchange and consume it without the need to pay an intermediary agency, and in creating records with less dependence on government officials, notaries and lawyers.

More information on how the Industry Committee would want to implement blockchain can be reasonably assumed to be obtainable following the June plenary. Meanwhile, businesses struggle to stay compliant with EU laws, most recently the GDPR, especially in blockchain implementations.