European Commission (EC) has invested €1.95 million in D-CENT to build a decentralized blockchain powered tool for direct democracy and economic empowerment.

D-CENT, which stands for Decentralized Citizens Engagement Technologies, is an initiative launched to bring citizens to a decision-making forefront. It is in fact a decentralized social network platform where people of Europe are allowed to discuss and share content, participate in community discussions, and even vote — each feature ensuring a democratic decision making module.

Released in 2014, D-CENT is now close to launch its pilot programs in multiple countries, the first ones being Spain, Italy, Iceland, and Finland. Under these pilot programs, D-CENT will be deploying blockchain-based digital currencies (such as Bitcoin) in parallel with the traditional ones to fund the direct democracy experiments.

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“Goal is to extend, scale and link up community digital social currencies, and create building blocks for an economy that links exchange to trust, deliberation and collective awareness.”

For instance: D-CENT is reportedly collaborating with one of the Iceland’s municipal corporations, where it will deploy cryptographic blockchain technologies for a political participation-based reward system. The project will also be lending hands to Eurocrat complimentary currency, a Barcelona-based initiative to decentralize service hosting and data custody.

In addition to the aforementioned initiatives, the D-CENT’s other projects include building a decentralized social remuneration system in Finland and launching a special digital currency for Italy’s culture sector, called Commoncoin.

The aforementioned projects, as diverse as they may seem, have one common objective: offering citizens the platforms to bottom-up their social and economics needs. Perhaps it is the only reason why EC, alongside some of the most prominent universities and organizations from Europe, are supporting D-CENT, for it brings forth the true depiction of Bitcoin technology — giving power back to the people.