The TRUST (digital TuRn in EUrope: Strengthening relational reliance through Technology) project promotes an interdisciplinary research program, involving academic and non-academic institutions from different backgrounds (legal, economic, engineering), belonging to EU, as well as Israel and China, in order to understand the mutual influence between trust and digital technologies.
The focus is on blockchain technology (BCT) as one of the most relevant forms of “Distributed Ledger Technology” (DLT), i.e., systems based on a distributed ledger, capable of creating a peer-to-peer economy – a decentralized model in which people they interact to buy or sell goods and services without intermediation – based on trust. Blockchain is considered a trust-building machine as it creates new forms of relational reliance; this technology projects the issue of trust in a new dimension that we intend to explore, in adherence with the initiatives and key actions promoted by the EC in the Communication “Shaping Europe’s digital future” (COM (2020) 67final), where it is remarked that trust and digital transformation of society go hand-in-hand.
The research and knowledge transfer programme evolves around key topics, such as:
- the development of a suitable regulatory framework for the effective integration of BTC in a trust-based society;
- the transition towards a fair and competitive peer to peer economy;
- the applications of BTC in the field of artificial intelligence to assure security and trust;
- the development of models of collaborative governance for smart cities based on trust.
