The European Commission Vice President Andrus Ansip has explained in a statement that the Commission is actively monitoring the developments of blockchain technology.

According to the statement, he said that the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has a limitless list of potential use cases that makes it both promising and challenging. The Commission has been working to foster the technology and has set up a FinTech Task Force following the Honourable Member of the European Parliament's Von Weizsäcker's report on Virtual Currencies. The Commission also has a work stream dedicated to explore DLT benefits and challenges as well as fields for application in financial services.

“Beyond financial services, the Commission services are actively reflecting on possible pilot projects to foster decentralized innovation ecosystems and help reshape interactions between consumers, producers, creators and among citizens, businesses and administrations to the end benefit of society. The Commission is already supporting DLT-enabled projects,” Ansip stated.

He added that the Commission's support towards activities to advance blockchain technology, are going to increase in the coming months. Also, the Commission aims to launch a study to investigate and learn the potentials of DLT in reshaping public services as well as preparing for EU specific DLT actions to address the challenges faced by EU.

The Commission will be organizing a conference along with the European Parliament on the topic ‘Demystifying Blockchain’. There will be series of panels and workshops to explore blockchain developments and its potential applications.

Ansip said that the Commission is also planning to investigate potential ways to develop experimentation frameworks enabling innovation, as a part of the Start-up and Scale-Up Initiative. The effort aims to give Europe's many innovative entrepreneurs in blockchain and fintech sector, every opportunity to become world leading companies.