Background: MyHealth@EU, the EU network enabling cross-border exchange of electronic health data (formerly eHDSI), enables cross-border ePrescription/eDispensation (eP/eD) and Patient Summary (PS) exchanges between EU Member States. Despite transport-level interoperability, persistent issues remain regarding transparency, provenance, non-repudiation, auditability, and semantic drift during translation/transcoding [1-6]. Methods: We used an architecture-research approach to design a permissioned "evidence Audit trail module" that observes, but does not alter, existing eP/eD and PS exchanges. The Audit trail module notarizes event digests and minimal provenance triples on a consortium ledger, with one validator per NCPeH, while all personal data remain off-chain under national control. We mapped components to ReEIF layers and evaluated the architecture in a controlled six-node synthetic testbed using non-inferiority thresholds for latency/throughput and improvement targets for transparency, semantic integrity, and GDPR-oriented operational drills [7-11]. Findings: In the controlled testbed, the Audit trail module added <= 30 ms median and <= 100 ms P95 latency, with throughput remaining within +/- 5% of baseline. Bilateral attestation coverage >= 95% enabled faster forensic reconstruction in operational drills, indicating potential MTTR reduction compared with the manual baseline, although this effect requires confirmation in live multi-country deployments. Terminology-version provenance coverage improved through version-pinned MVC/MTC edges, while code-mismatch and missing-provenance events fell by 43% and 62%, respectively, under synthetic workload conditions. GDPR-oriented drills met the predefined targets through joint-controllership workflows, no on-chain PII, and rectification/erasure handling via linkage-secret rotation [12-15]. Conclusions/Implications: A ReEIF-aligned evidence Audit trail module can provide a low-disruption route to improving transparency, provenance, and auditability in MyHealth@EU without modifying payloads or transport flows. The controlled evaluation supports technical feasibility and operational plausibility, but the findings should be interpreted as testbed evidence rather than production proof. A live two-country pilot is required to validate MTTR, semantic-integrity, resource-use, and governance benefits under real MyHealth@EU operating conditions.

Higher Education (HE) institutions and Lifelong Learning (LLL) providers increasingly issue digital certificates, yet prevailing solutions often lack interoperable credential schemas, verifiable provenance, and privacy-preserving verification at scale. In parallel, European initiatives promote verifiable credentials and cross-border recognition, but there is limited evidence on how Hyperledger Indy components—Redundant Byzantine Fault Tolerance (RBFT) consensus, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Anonymous Credentials (AnonCreds), and revocation registries—can be integrated into existing learning platforms while satisfying software service-quality and governance requirements. This paper presents a permissioned, privacy-preserving blockchain architecture for secure issuance and verification of educational verifiable credentials (VCs) and evaluates schema interoperability between LLL providers and HE institutions against three European reference frameworks: the Diploma Supplement (DS), ECCOE, and MicroHE/CMF. The proposed design integrates a Hyperledger Indy network with a Moodle plugin and a middleware layer that captures learning events, issues VCs to a digital wallet, and supports schema comparison and hybridization. The study combines comparative schema analysis of major Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms with two stakeholder workshops (n = 7 institutions) and a qualitative security and service-quality evaluation mapped to a threat model and core software-quality attributes (integrity, availability, confidentiality, interoperability). Results indicate that LLL and HE schemas share sufficient metadata to enable DS-aligned issuance with minimal adaptation, and stakeholders report readiness to adopt standards when mandated or widely disseminated. The architecture provides tamper-evident provenance, issuer authentication, selective disclosure, and revocation support while keeping personally identifiable information off-chain.

Cryptocurrencies have recently gained popularity because of the exceptionally secure transactions. Blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies, offers security, decentralization, transparency, and immutability to its users. The current paper is about the acceptance of blockchain in education in universities and lifelong learning organizations. A brief introduction is made of the terms that are used to describe a proposed blockchain system, such as micro-credential, skills, ECTS, tokens and educational passport. Moreover, based on these terms the creation of questionnaires to ascertain the target groups’ expectations of a system that will verify a learner’s knowledge and abilities after completing training activities in a competent and verifiable manner is described. Finally, the results of these questionnaires from more 900 students and 80 professors are presented, showcasing that that a blockchain system in education, where students would be able to save their personal data and organisations could validate and access them, would be extremely helpful to everyone involved.

Purpose The main purpose and research question of the paper are to investigate the practical application of the eHealth Digital Service Infrastructure (eHDSI) network, with a specific focus on ePrescription (eP), eDispensation (eD), and Patient Summary (PS) use cases, in order to address issues related to transparency, data integrity, privacy, and security in cross-border transactions within this network. The ultimate goal is to determine whether blockchain (BC) technology can effectively resolve these issues without violating General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations or hindering network interoperability. Methods The method employed in this study involves conducting empirical research on eHealth networks to propose the incorporation of BC modules in-to network’s architecture and services aimed at enhancing and addressing transparency, data integrity, security, GDPR compliance, and maintaining interoperability challenges. Graphical illustrations intended for implementation on private BC networks are offered as a guide for BC architects and DevOps professionals. Results The paper explains how BC’s ledger records transactions and data exchanges transparently. Smart Contracts (SmC) enforce data sharing agreements, ensuring interoperability standards. Access control, encryption, and key pairs enhance security for eHDSI. This integration aims for tamper-proof, auditable transaction history, ensuring data quality. It details GDPR-compliant BC architecture with features like data anonymization, consent management, and mechanisms for data rectification and deletion. Conclusions The paper concludes by summarizing the key findings of the research. It highlights the role of BC technology in enhancing transparency, security, and interoperability within the eHealth domain while addressing challenges related to data quality and privacy protection. It also acknowledges the need for innovative solutions to align with GDPR requirements. The paper suggests that the insights and recommendations derived from the study can be applied to other industries with similar characteristics, such as high centralization and the exchange of personal data across borders. Overall, the study emphasizes the practical value of BC-supported systems in real-world applications within the eHealth sector.

The academic and business domains are in constant transformation due to the technological advances. In this context, proof of knowledge, skills and training are becoming crucial for the students and employees. In a competitive environment like that, forgery of diplomas and certificates is a frequent problem that has not been faced properly yet. Additionally, the lack of a formal representation and acknowledgment of informal and life-long learning outcomes costs to all educational stakeholders and employee seekers. By using open source blockchain technology as a game changer throughout the educational process, security, privacy, integrity and immutability of the data related to diplomas, certificates and skills acquired by learners can be guaranteed. The result of building a system supported by blockchain for life-long learning, a positive impact in trust and transparency of the education achievements, institutions, students and companies is achieved.

In the growing field of digital learning opportunities, as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are, the knowledge and skills validation and certification still lack the required coherence and transparency that would allow learners to earn comparable and stackable certificates. This paper addresses the lack of standardization in certification processes through the development of a web platform. The prototype described here first serves to embed types of information displayed across various certificates, degrees, and credentials in a unified way. Second, it allows to gain insights into the certification standards used by various providers, thus easing the process of issuing certificates in a coherent, stackable manner.

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES SUPPORTING THE STANDARDISATION OF CREDENTIALS AMONG MOOC PROVIDERS

During the last decade Internet of Things has become one of the key technologies in supporting digital transformation of several ecosystems such urban or industry ones. The huge amount of data generated in such contexts as well as the imperative requirements in terms of trustworthiness, authenticity and integrity make compulsory the adoption of the proper solutions fitting those requirements. This paper presents the design, implementation and validation of a distributed ledger technology architecture emphasizing services linked to data valorization.

With smart vehicles interconnected with multiple systems and other entities, whether they are people or IoT devices, the importance of a digital identity for them has emerged. We present in this paper how a Self-Sovereign Identities combined with blockchain can provide a solution to this end, in order to decentralize the identity management and provide them with capabilities to identify the other entities they interact with. Such entities can be the owners of the vehicles, other drivers and workshops that act as service providers. Two use cases are examined along with the interactions between the participants, to demonstrate how a decentralized identity management solution can take care of the necessary authentication and authorization processes. Finally, we test the system and provide the measurements to prove its feasibility in real-life deployments.

In recent years, sustainable supply chain management practices have been adopted by companies that desire to reduce the negative environmental and social impacts within their supply chains. Within this perspective, a circular approach has been developed in the supply chain literature. Circular economy models and solutions assisted by industry 4.0 technologies have been developed to transform products in the end of their life cycle into new products with different use. In this paper an industry 4.0 waste-to-energy solution is developed and applied in a pilot case study comprised by a real-world supply chain to evaluate the sustainability performance of circular supply chain management (CSCM). The findings show that redesigning supply chains for circular economy with the use of Industry 4.0 technologies, can enable circular supply chain management. Clear benefits are provided linking the proposed solution to the six circular economy dimensions of the ReSOLVE model i.e. regenerate, share, optimise, loop, virtualise, and exchange. Improved availability of personnel (5% and 15%) and fleet resources (15%) are identified as some of the key quantitative benefits, while supply chain traceability through the full visibility and automation offered by the proposed solution, are some of the key non-quantifiable outcomes. The present work seeks to contribute to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence of how industry 4.0 and circular economy are applied in practice. Implications for managers and policy makers, along with the study limitations and further research paths are also presented.

Modern Internet of Things (IoT) networks including vehicle networks face an increased demand for security and access control with respect to privacy for sensitive data. Data manipulation and tampering of emissions values due to the economic incentives and environmental and health issues require a tamper-proof solution with the use of blockchain (BC) where the integrity of data is ensured. In this paper, we propose the integration of a public permissioned Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI) framework with a permissioned consortium BC based architecture. This innovatively supports the decentralization of the authentication and authorization processes to overcome the single point of failure problems and the use of SSI to assign identities to IoT devices. Additionally, it gives full control to the holders for their identities, whether they are humans, organizations or smart vehicles. With the practice of advanced zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) cryptographic techniques, the exposure of sensitive and private information is minimized to the absolute necessary and gains in performance and scalability are achieved. Furthermore, the way this ecosystem of technologies is combined guarantees a trusted environment for enabling and automating vehicles’ emissions certification according to emissions standards and regulations. Detailed descriptions of the processes required to integrate Hyperledger Indy (HLI) SSIs to authenticate and authorize entities on a Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) network are being quoted.

Blockchain technology enables the trustless sharing of distributed ledgers among peers. Despite having valuable properties like decentralisation, and immutability of transactions, it incurs a high performance overhead as compared with traditional databases thus discouraging its further adoption. Even the usage of different transaction processors within the same Blockchain platform, namely Hyperledger Sawtooth, may result in different performance, for the same use case and the same transaction type. This paper proposes a methodology for evaluating the performance of two different transaction processors deployed in the Hyperledger Sawtooth platform. We evaluated experimentally the methodology and present the results of the experimental evaluation which may be useful to blockchain practitioners for future solution designs.

The adoption of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and Web 3.0 contributes to the e-government sector by transforming how public administrations provide advanced and innovative services to interact with citizens. Blockchain (BC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) disruptive technologies will reshape how we live, work, and interact with government sectors and industries. This paper presents how Blockchain 3.0 and Artificial Intelligence enhance robust, secure, scalable, and authenticity provenance solutions. Two validation scenarios are analyzed to present how blockchain smart contracts and AI agents support energy and health-oriented e-government services.

The advancement and penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and renewable energy sources (RES) are transforming legacy energy systems in an attempt to reduce carbon emissions and energy waste. Demand Response (DR) has been identified as a key enabler of integrating these, and other, Smart Grid technologies, while, simultaneously, ensuring grid stability and secure energy supply. The massive deployment of smart meters, IoT devices and DERs dictate the need to move to decentralized, or even localized, DR schemes in the face of the increased scale and complexity of monitoring and coordinating the actors and devices in modern smart grids. Furthermore, there is an inherent need to guarantee interoperability, due to the vast number of, e.g., hardware and software stakeholders, and, more importantly, promote trust and incentivize the participation of customers in DR schemes, if they are to be successfully deployed.In this work, we illustrate the design of an energy system that addresses all of the roadblocks that hinder the large scale deployment of DR services. Our DR framework incorporates modern Smart Grid technologies, such as fog-enabled and IoT devices, DERs and RES to, among others, automate asset handling and various time-consuming workflows. To guarantee interoperability, our system employs OpenADR, which standardizes the communication of DR signals among energy stakeholders. Our approach acknowledges the need for decentralization and employs blockchains and smart contracts to deliver a secure, privacy-preserving, tamper-resistant, auditable and reliable DR framework. Blockchains provide the infrastructure to design innovative DR schemes and incentivize active consumer participation as their aforementioned properties promote transparency and trust. In addition, we harness the power of smart contracts which allows us to design and implement fully automated contractual agreements both among involved stakeholders, as well as on a machine-to-machine basis. Smart contracts are digital agents that "live" in the blockchain and can encode, execute and enforce arbitrary agreements. To illustrate the potential and effectiveness of our smart contract-based DR framework, we present a case study that describes the exchange of DR signals and the autonomous instantiation of smart contracts among involved participants to mediate and monitor transactions, enforce contractual clauses, regulate energy supply and handle payments/penalties.

Blockchain technology back in 2009 was mainly used for finance use cases due to the cryptocurrency support of the Bitcoin and the Ethereum networks. Nowadays with the emergence of business oriented distributed ledger frameworks we can find blockchain (BC) in almost every aspect of our everyday real-life transactions. Starting with supply chain, BC has been used to support and secure education, e-government, real estate, insurance, healthcare and other business cases. Regarding blockchain in supply chain, examples as the Walmart and IBM partnership shows that smart contracts (SC) and cryptocurrencies can disrupt the way suppliers, shippers, retailers and customers trust each other and interact. This paper describes how we applied BC technology in two real-life supply chain scenarios. The first one is for logging and tracing products, showing how we can use SCs to identify the ingredients of food products and how to uniquely identify the food product throughout its shipment from the factory to the customer who purchase it. Important aspects of this route is the transparency of the process as well as the verification of transport. The second one deals with how authentication works for users holding BC identities. The identity of a user is important in order to secure the network, allowing only permissioned parties to access it and perform actions on the data. As long as the network is private and immutable, authenticating and authorizing users is crucial for enforcing the end-to-end security to increase users' trust and protect the confidentiality of data. While exploring these two scenarios we define the actors, the transactions these actors can perform on the systems and we propose the SCs that have to be implemented for these use cases to take advantage of BC's unique characteristics, as immutability and non-repudiation. In addition, we provide sample template SCs for both scenarios.

Since 2009 when Bitcoin was introduced, followed by the evolution of permissioned and permissionless blockchain networks as we know of them today, the technology of distributed ledgers is continuously changing to satisfy the markets interest into them. Alongside, software development methodologies are also evolving in order to incorporate the businesses and users demands. The broad use of internet in everyday tasks and services such as Backend as a Service, Database as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service have formed the software processes that are adopted to produce the final product. Blockchain changes drastically the way software is developed and companies producing software must adapt quickly by changing their software processes accordingly to avoid obstacles and pitfalls coming of that, in order to incorporate this new technology but also follow techniques, which will produce sustainable software.