€2.75m awarded to European consortium to solve market failure of artificially scarce digital goods

Aalto led consortium ATARCA has been granted a Horizon 2020 Novel Ideas for Rapidly Changing Technologies award of €2.75M for two years of project funding.  Pekka Nikander, Professor of Practice, is the project leader for this project developing Accounting Technologies for Anti-Rival Coordination and Allocation. Consortium members are Aalto University, Demos Research Institute (Helsinki, Finland), Streamr Network AG (Zug, Switzerland), Associacio Novact (Barcelona, Spain), and Qbit Artifacts SL (Onda, Spain).

The EU awarded prize is for research and innovation in developing distributed ledger technologies for data markets. Data market failures, and identifying means to remedy them, is at the forefront of the challenge to efficiently use industrial data.

Professor Nikander explains that, “In ATARCA, we create cryptographically protected anti-rival tokens and test their applicability to governing industrial data markets and fostering cooperation in community driven currencies. If successful, this technology will not only help to properly organise the markets for data and other digital goods, but provide the structural fundamentals of a new type of economic growth. This will allow the societies at large to more widely explore structurally new incentives for systemic sustainability and scalable systemic intelligence.”

University Lecturer Dr. Ville Eloranta, Assistant Professor Vikash Kumar Sinha, Dr. Esko Hakanen, and Doctoral Candidate Ulriikka Järvihaavisto, all from Aalto University, will be working on the project.  Dr.  S.M. Amadae, University Lecturer in Global Political Economy, University of Helsinki, is also collaborating on this project. 

This new medium of sharing will be tested in two different pilot projects. The first pilot will be run in Barcelona together with local communities using the REC, a new social currency. The REC is a citizen exchange system complementary to the Euro, to which a second dimension, that of sharing, will be added. REC is an initiative of NOVACT, the international Institute for Nonviolent Action, which promotes social transformation processes based on human rights, justice and democracy in the Euro-Mediterranean region.

In the second pilot, ATARCA will develop, together with the open source project Streamr and its consulting company TX, new industrial data markets to test drive mediums of sharing as a means of payment within Streamr’s real-time data ecosystem. Streamr is a decentralized P2P network for the transmission and sharing of real-time data. TX will be handling the technical implementation of both pilot projects.

Demos Research Institute oversees the EU policy interaction within the ATARCA consortia. Demos has previously contributed to the interplay between policies and DLT, as well as AI technologies in research projects funded by Horizon 2020, the Finnish Strategic Research Council and the Prime Minister’s Office in Finland.

Professor Nikander’s success builds on his earlier €1M prize for GMeRitS from the Enhanced European Innovation Council’s award for Blockchains for Social Good.   Dr.  Eloranta jointly submitted the GMeRitS proposal and is also in the ATARCA consortium.  ATARCA builds on GMeRitS ideas.

More information

Ville Eloranta, D.Sc. (Tech), University Lecturer
Aalto University School of Business
Dept. of Management Studies
+358 40 706 7012, ville.eloranta@aalto.fi
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/villeeloranta

S.M. Amadae, PhD, Researcher
Aalto School of Business
sm.amadae@aalto.fi