Hardware-based Security for Blockchain Technologies (HardBlock)

Operation co-funded by EU cohesion policy (European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)) under the programme Multi-regional Spain - ERDF (2014ES16RFOP002), managing authority: Subdirección General de Gestión del FEDER, de la Dirección General de Fondos Europeos del Ministerio de Hacienda.. The source names no beneficiary for this operation. Location: Seville Province (NUTS ES618); Spain. Budget: total eligible expenditure EUR 175,170; EU co-financing EUR 140,136 (co-financing rate 80%), as stated by the source. Runs 2018-01-01 to 2021-06-30. Source: Kohesio, EU cohesion policy projects managed by national and regional authorities (not CORDIS); selected because its summary names quantum technology. Summary from Kohesio (English machine translation by the source): Blockchain technologies are relatively new, so they present not only advantages but also serious weaknesses derived from: lack of scalability, (ii) high cost of consensus testing linked to transactions, (iii) difficult management of physical identities of things and persons, and (iv) limitations of current cryptography. To reduce the above limitations, the HardBlock project will design and implement novel hardware devices (BOKs) that will interact with permissioned blockchains. The BOKs will allow you to generate non-counterfeitable identities of things because they will use Physical Unclonable Functions or PUFs and non-supplantable identities of people because they will use multi-biometry, and integrate new generation cryptography functionalities. A Specific Integrated Application Circuit (ASIC) will be designed and manufactured that will be the core of the BOKs. To understand the functionalities that HardBlock will offer, let’s briefly develop the weaknesses identified in blockchain technologies: The first of these is their scalability problem. The average time to include a block in the chain is in the order of minutes in Bitcoin. In Ethereum it is seconds, still excessive for real-time applications (e.g.: payment networks that process about 2,000 transactions/sec.) Another associated problem is the high cost of maintenance. Proof of work is getting so complicated (cryptocurrencies rise in value) that miners must invest in powerful hardware equipment. While centralised networks manage transactions without the need for proof of work, transactions in Bitcoin amount to the order of one million dollars in electricity, with electricity consumption being estimated in 2020 similar to that of all Denmark. Another unresolved problem is managing with confidence, security and privacy the physical identities of things and people. In a blockchain, instead of users with a physical identity, digital keys, asymmetric keys (public and private) created by the users themselves are [shortened; the full text is on the Kohesio page]

Original source.

Source: Kohesio (EU cohesion policy projects), European Commission, Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO). Retrieved 2026-10-21. Licence: CC0 1.0 (Cohesion Open Data Platform, dataset 2014-2020 Kohesio projects). Selected metadata, adapted presentation; the publisher's record is authoritative. No endorsement by the source is implied. Licence: public domain dedication (CC0 1.0).

AI-assisted summary: The HardBlock project, co-funded by the EU, aims to address weaknesses in blockchain technologies by designing novel hardware devices. It operates in Seville Province, Spain, from January 1, 2018, to June 30, 2021, with a total budget of EUR 175,170. Suggested technology pillar: enabling. Generated by AI from the public source text; it may contain errors and the original source is authoritative.