NGI Ledger opens for second round of funding

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Edgeryders one of the organizations running NGI Forward, a project tasked with helping the European Commission set out a strategy, as well as a policy and research agenda for the years ahead. This forum is a part of informing that strategy. Another part of the NGI ecosystem is generous funding opportunities, like that of NGI Ledger, which just opened its second round of funding for “16 projects to build Minimum viable products working on decentralised technologies where privacy by design, openness and citizen data sovereignty are at the core of their proposition”. Basically, it’s looking for projects focused on decentralised algorithms based on blockchains , distributed ledger technology (DLT) and/or peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies.

There are successful applicants from the first round on the Edgeryders forum. @BlackForestBoi and team received funding for WorldBrain.

Apply to LEDGER here. But first, you might want to seek advice from the community here on the platform. If you have ideas, we could help pair you up with people you might want to collaborate with or who could give you feedback on your application. Ping @zelf, @eb4890, @alcinnz, @zaunders, are you working on something at the moment that could fit the bill?

@felix.wolfsteller, @JuliaV, @kristofer, @notme, @noah, @William_COACT perhaps you know of someone who might be interested?

LEDGER: THE VENTURE BUILDER FOR HUMAN CENTRIC SOLUTIONS

Ledger second open call will be opening the 1st November and closing the 31st January 2020.

At LEDGER first open call we selected 16 projects over 1000 applications started and 291 submitted from over 35 countries.

At the second open call we are looking for another 16 projects to build Minimum viable products (MVPs) working on decentralised technologies where privacy by design, openness and citizen data sovereignty are at the core of their proposition.

LEDGER programme offers to the selected projects:

  • Up to €200K equity-free for the best in class innovators
  • A Venture Builder Programme of 12 months
  • Technical and business mentorship along the programme
  • Access to Venture Capital, pilots, exposure and networking
  • LEDGER is calling for #developers #researchers #designers and entrepreneurs

WHO CAN APPLY?

  • Teams might be composed of either:
    • minimum 1 and maximum 2 legal persons (SME, research organizations, foundations) with a team composed by at least 3 profiles (researcher, developer, business development/entrepreneur) or
    • minimum 3 natural persons (at least a researcher, developer and business development/entrepreneur ).
  • The teams must consist of one legal entities or at least 3 natural persons legally established in an EU member state or in Associated Countries .
  • Projects ( Technology Transfer Experiments ) have to be based in Research components , relevant for the topic of Privacy-by-Design , Distributed Data Governance and consisting in development, test and validation of technical and economic viability of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or Service .
  • The results of these bottom-up projects should be compliant with Open Licences (i.e. Open Hardware , Open Software and/or Creative Commons ).

MORE ABOUT LEDGER

LEDGER , a European project financed by the European Commission , is looking for 32 human centric innovators to develop Minimum Viable Products and Services , in order to achieve new models that preserve citizens’ digital sovereignty , where data is a common good owned by citizens and wealth created by data-driven platforms is equally distributed.

LEDGER is looking for SMEs , organisations and researchers that want to shift data management, leveraging on decentralised algorithms based on blockchains , distributed ledger technology (DLT) and/or peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies to address Privacy-by-Design , reliability , trustworthiness and openness to build human centric solutions .

The 16 selected companies will go through a 9-month customised venture builder programme receiving up to €150K in funding , and the best 8 will be offered additional €50K and will get in a business focused programme of 3 months.

Also, ping @RobvanKranenburg – perhaps you could tell us a little about how the first round is panning out?

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Pinging a few others who may be interested: @Andrusha, @evangineer, @questioneer, @martial, @kazarnowicz, @matteo_ghetti, @rasmus, @nadan and @phoebe

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Hi Hugi,

To really follow the process you have to follow the updates on ledger.eu for although I am part of dyne.org (rob@dyne.org) Denis Jaromil Roio and Federico Bonelli are they key people in LEDGER.

As you ask my opinion I’d say that it is the work in DECODE in which a provable computing environment is being developed on natural language smart contracts that is a guiding scheme, without of course enforcing this on the participants. Zenroom provides the cryptography and the sensitive data manipulation for the whole Decode project, implementing the Coconut credential scheme developed by UCL in 2018.

Validation of the approach commercially is provided by the aqui-hire of Facebook of the UCL team to build LIBRA. “In the absence of any detail on what might comprise a decentralized identity standard from Libra’s perspective, some dots can be joined by examining the recent work of George Danezis and his co-founders at Chainspace, a startup acquired by Facebook in May.” Recently Microsoft announced their variation on a Coconut credential scheme.

Accountability over anonymity characterizes this approach as it underlies society in the 20th century itself. Tokenized trust is a key feature but only in the actual locality where face to face and communities of people work and live together.

Apart from innovation in code and coding practice LEDGER - a consortium of Funding Box, Bluemorpho and dyne.org, with VC, funding and business modeling expertise inside - is uncompromising when it comes to collaborative and meaningful cooperation. I was present at the kickoff on Amsterdam where Master of Ceremony Federico rearranged not just physically but also conceptually the notion of information sharing, but not having teams presenting in the usual ways.

Recently, in fact last week, he took it a step further and brought all teams to Sicily to work on real world problems with real people in a real location.

Now, ofcourse this is what most applications are about, but making it tangible and especially exploring the granularity of everyday life shows the uncompromising nature of Federico’s array of methodologies (trasformatorio)

See for yourself:

Vimeo channel:

Greetings, Rob

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