The European Commission launched a new Horizon Prize called ‘Blockchains for Social Good’ in December of last year and the competition is now open for submissions as of May 16th, 2018. There are five prizes of €1 million and each will be awarded to innovators that use blockchain technology to develop decentralized solutions bringing about positive social change.
The closing date for submissions is 3rd September 2018 at 17:00:00 CET2
This EIC (European Innovation Council) Horizon Prize rewards the development of scalable, efficient and effective decentralized solutions to sustainability challenges which exploit the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) used in blockchains. It is funded under Horizon 2020, the EU research and innovation programme.
The objective is to stimulate the development of out-of-the-box multidisciplinary solutions to social challenges in areas such as support of fair trade, increasing transparency in production processes, decentralizing data governance and enhancing privacy, improving accountability and contributing to financial inclusion.
This challenge is targeted at a wide range of actors: individuals, social entrepreneurs, civil society organizations, research centers from technological and social disciplines, creative industries, students, hackers, start-ups and SMEs. Tackling this challenge requires multidisciplinary expertise.
The contest is open to all legal entities (i.e. natural or legal persons, including international organizations) or groups of legal entities.
The prize will be awarded, after closure of the contest, to the contestant(s) who, in the opinion of the jury, demonstrates a solution that best meets the following cumulative criteria.
- Social impact: both potential and already achieved by the implementation of the solution (e.g. size of the community of users engaged by the actual implementation)
- Decentralization and governance: improvements in transparency and accountability (while respecting privacy and/or anonymity)
- Usability and inclusiveness
- Viability at large scale: cost-efficiency (including energy consumption), scalability, security, and sustainability
- Clear added value of the demonstrated implementation for European citizens, in societal, economic or environmental terms
These criteria, scoring and the weighting methodologies, as well as the detailed timetable and conditions for participation, are further defined in the Rules of Contest.
While entrants are free to commercially exploit applications and services based on the developed solutions, their source code is required to be released under an Open Source Licence.
