Etla’s Juri Mattila joins European Commission’s expert workgroup

Etla researcher Juri Mattila has been invited to the European Commission’s expert working group examining the disruptive effects of blockchain technology on industries. The project’s second workshop will be held in Brussels in mid-November.

The EU Policy Lab of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s in-house science service, is currently running the project #Blockchain4EU: Blockchain for Industrial Transformations, in cooperation with DG GROW, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship & SMEs.

Juri Mattila will participate in the project’s workgroup focusing on the energy industry.

– Our research has shown that in the case of blockchain technology, more active innovation policies and a proactive regulatory approach are required to ensure international competitiveness in Europe. It is positive to see that the Commission has embraced this kind of a role, Mattila states.

In his research at Etla, Mattila specialises in the digital economy. He has contributed to the development of a blockchain application for the energy sector, which enables distributed market coordination for decentralized energy systems. As its core element, the application utilises Ethereum-based smart contracts to facilitate market matching between individual producers and consumers of electricity.

The motive for the application was to understand the process of developing blockchain applications with industrial partners. It also served to examine whether Ethereum-based smart contracts could be effectively utilised for similar applications in industry, and society at large.

– I look forward to joining the workgroup, as I expect it will provide a great opportunity to network with some of the leading experts in Europe in this field. I am also looking forward to the opportunity to develop the innovation environment in Europe to be as well-suited for blockchain technology as possible. The workgroup also provides a good forum for making the Finnish blockchain expertise more conspicuous in Europe and showing that we have a supportive and attractive environment for innovators to operate.

Juri Mattila’s latest research involves a blockchain application developed for the real-estate industry. It enables distributed workflow management in a complicated transaction process: the selling of a share of stocks in a housing corporation. As its core element, this application also utilises Ethereum-based smart contracts to facilitate the interaction of various parties involved, as well as the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to combine data from a number of separate information pools.