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The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded $143,478 to Danube Tech, a Vienna-based company, to develop blockchain security technology.
In a press release dated September 26, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) said that Danube Tech was awarded the contract to develop blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) solutions to fulfill a common need across DHS missions.
S&T pointed out that various services such as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Citizenship and Immigration Services issue, validate and verify licenses and certifications. However, being largely paper-based, the existing processes could be susceptible to loss, destruction, forgery and counterfeiting.
To address these challenges, S&T said that it is exploring the application of blockchain and DLT to digitize the issuance of credentials.
The award to Danube Tech was made under S&T’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP) Other Transaction Solicitation Preventing Forgery & Counterfeiting of Certificates and Licenses. Companies participating in SVIP can get up to $800,000 of non-dilutive funding over four phases to develop and adapt commercial technologies for homeland security use cases.
As per the release, Danube Tech has received the Phase I award for “its Universal Issuer and Verifier project and will integrate interoperability support for multiple credential data formats, blockchains and standardized and open application programming interfaces into their existing decentralized identifier (DID) registrar and DID resolver products for credential issuance and identity verification.”
In August, an advisory committee under the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced its plans to launch live testing of its blockchain-based intellectual rights (IPR) proof-of-concept (POC).
