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IOTA Stiftung

IOTA Foundation

The IOTA Foundation is a charitable organization whose mission is to support the development and standardization of distributed ledger technologies (DLT), including the IOTA Tangle.

Lobbying Activity

Response to European Data Union Strategy

18 Jul 2025

We welcome the Commissions initiative to establish a European Data Union Strategy that simplifies the regulatory landscape, enhances legal certainty, and unlocks high-value datasets for innovation. We recommend that the Strategy explicitly acknowledges the importance of public permissionless blockchains as a privacy-preserving, decentralised, infrastructure. Permissionless blockchains offer transparency, auditability, and resilience by design, without reliance on centralized intermediaries, and enable privacy-preserving, self-sovereign data models, such as zero-knowledge proofs and self-sovereign identity, that are aligned with fundamental rights and EU values. Additionally, decentralised systems can enhance overall robustness by avoiding single points of failure and enabling user-controlled encryption and access, providing a more resilient foundation for data management and security. Their inclusion is critical to fostering a trustworthy, open, and globally competitive data economy. To fully harness this potential, the Strategy should commit to technological neutrality, avoid default classification of all blockchain data as personal data, and refrain from assigning controllership to infrastructure participantssuch as node operatorswho lack influence over the purposes and means of data processing. It should also explicitly endorse the use of off-chain storage and cryptographic techniques and alternative erasure mechanisms, such as revocation or access removal, that can fulfil erasure obligations in immutable systems, as valid safeguards for GDPR compliance. The Strategy should further recognize that classifying all on-chain data as pseudonymized overstates the identifiability of such data, which in many cases lacks any reasonable link to an identifiable individual absent additional off-chain information. By recognizing the specific strengths of decentralised architectures, the Strategy can create the legal clarity and regulatory flexibility needed to support innovation, reduce fragmentation, and advance Europes digital sovereignty.
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Meeting with Nicolas Schmit (Commissioner) and

19 Jul 2021 · Pact for Skills roundtable with the digital transition sector.

Meeting with Thierry Breton (Commissioner) and

19 Jul 2021 · Skills Roundtable on Digital