space4green
Why Trust is a Must in Transactions
In B2B and B2C relations, having trust in the information exchanged among stakeholders is an essential requirement. Every second of every day, businesses exchange items with suppliers, partners, customers, and others. Such exchanges are transactions that need to be reliable, precise, and agreed upon among the participants. Moreover, in many transactions, full automation is not possible, and a trusted centralized entity is needed, and in many cases, human intercession is needed to certify the proper execution of such transactions (audit, public notaries, third-party certifier…). Trust is an intrinsic necessity in the value chains of today.
Don’t Pay the Trust Tax
Meanwhile, it is evident that establishing trust is a challenging task, and it comes with significant costs, which we refer to as the “trust tax.”
This term summarizes all costs related to establishing an appropriate level of trust using audits, monitoring activities, or the involvement of trusted intermediaries.
How Blockchain can Ensure Trusted Transactions
In this line, one of the emerging technologies with increasing market adoption is DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology), more specifically blockchain. Blockchain is an immutable digital ledger of transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value. Blockchain technology helps significantly to reduce the “trust tax” as all transactions are verified through cryptography, each subsequent transaction is cryptographically linked to the previous one, and all transactions are recorded on a publicly distributed ledger promoting trust, transparency, and traceability. Far from being a theoretical concept, blockchain has been proven as a value-adding technology in the world of financial services through cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Resilience is gained by the fact that blockchain supports a distributed network, which minimizes single points of failure, and by providing high levels of trust without intermediaries or monitoring and control activities.
Space4green
Project title
Trusted and GREEN traceability throught EU SPACE Technologies
Project reference
HORIZON-EUSPA-2021-SPACE-02-53
Number: 101004309
Project coordinator
Integrasys S.A
Start date: 23/11/2022
Duration: 24 months
Sponsored by
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme and EUSPA under grant agreement Nº 101082630
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AGRICULTURE & SPACE; The journey from field to fork
Agriculture is one of the main sectors to benefit from leveraging the power of EU Space Programmes such as Galileo OSNMA, Copernicus services, and Remote Sensing technologies to implement and monitor compliance with the Common Agricultural Policy. The uptake of precision agriculture in Europe is gradually but steadily becoming the new norm and its added value in terms of productivity, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability justifies why more applications that rely on (GNSS-backed) precise positioning are needed.
The flow of agricultural commodities has long been subject to controls, regulations, and checks. Today, there is an increasing need to track food from source to consumer, primarily in order to ensure the safety and quality of the produce, but also to implement certain policy objectives (such as fair trade, organic foods, carbon offsets, etc.). This is where blockchain, in combination with Earth Observation (EO) and GNSS, can ensure the traceability chain is immutable, immediately auditable, and entirely digital. The new pioneering service of Galileo, namely the Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) is a data authentication function that paves the way toward robust Position, Velocity and Time information.
Sustainable supply chain management
The unique combination of technologies used in SPACE4GREEN will demonstrate how Galileo, Europe’s global satellite navigation system, and Copernicus, Europe’s Earth observation and monitoring programme, are helping to develop the tools needed for the European agricultural sector. The technologies are being used in 5 Demonstration Cases, helping farmers make informed decisions on every aspect of their business.
In order to build a food system that supports farmers and producers to protect and restore nature, while providing everyone with nutritious and affordable food, it is important to look to the future and space for solutions. Now, more than ever, GNSS solutions facilitate our ways of growing, transporting, and consuming food.
These technologies help us in ensuring transparency, traceability, and trust in agri-food value chains, in building systems that support the authentication of the geographical origin of agricultural products (i.e olive oil, wine), and in providing a metric (e.g. the Environmental Sustainability Index) to guide the sustainable farming practices for arable and perennial crops.
space4green
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme and EUSPA under grant agreement Nº 101082630
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