Today TE-FOOD announced that its Trust One blockchain solution for COVID certificates is to be used for issuing health certificates following tests conducted at 12 Spanish airports.
The company has partnered with testing company Eurofins Megalab, which has set up sampling stations at the 12 airports, including Barcelona, Mallorca, Ibiza and the Canary Islands. Test results will be logged in the Trust One solution that uses blockchain so that someone can verify the validity of the test results.
At this stage, Trust One is not being used for checking the health certificates at arrivals. Instead, it’s for the issuance of the certificate by Eurofins Megalab. And it’s used to prove a test has been taken at boarding. In future when the EU Digital Green Certificate goes live, potentially the Trust One app will be used for reading it on arrival as well.
TE-FOOD also previously collaborated with GE Aviation, but this installation is not associated with GE. Separately, Emirates is trialing the solution in conjunction with GE Digital and TE-FOOD.
Paper-based test or vaccine certificates can be easily copied and forged. Hence there is a proliferation of blockchain solutions that aim to verify them.
Unsurprisingly, several blockchain applications specifically target travel. The highest profile one is from the airline association IATA. It was developed in conjunction with identity firm Evernym which is known for its dedication to privacy.
However, there’s a massive challenge in getting different solutions to interoperate. Even though many comply with W3C standards for verifiable credentials, there are so many ways to implement the standards that it’s not a trivial thing for airports to read certificates from all the different applications.
There are alliances such as the ID2020 Good Health Pass Collaborative that aim to achieve interoperability, but given several solutions have already been developed, it’s a major challenge.