Santhosh Balasa
My fellowship focuses on standardizing Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for sustainable asset management, addressing gaps in digital asset representation, regulatory clarity, and ESG alignment. It supports innovation, transparency, and interoperability in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), in line with EU priorities.
Current NFT-based RWA systems lack harmonised frameworks, causing fragmentation in asset tracking, legal recognition, and compliance. This hinders adoption across supply chains, carbon markets, and IP management. My project proposes a cross-industry standard to ensure interoperability, regulatory alignment, and lifecycle transparency.
In this sense, the there are two major priorities for this action, including:
Standardized Multi-Asset Tokenization that enables NFT-based tracking of physical, environmental, and intangible assets. It also enhances lifecycle transparency, supports the circular economy, and ensures blockchain interoperability.
Digital Product Passport (DPP) to align NFTs with DPP for end-to-end traceability, compliance, and ESG reporting.This strengthens supply chain transparency and EU circular economy goals.
The key Challenges related to my activity are:
Regulatory Uncertainty: Lack of clear NFT standards impedes legal and policy alignment. This initiative ensures conformity with EU law and ISO.
Adoption Barriers: Fragmented governance limits integration. Standardisation enhances technical and regulatory trust.
Sustainability Concerns: Energy-intensive DLTs are problematic. This activity promotes efficient models aligned with the Green Deal.
Consequently, this project positions Europe as a leader in NFT standardisation, fostering secure, compliant, and sustainable digital ecosystems.
The standards being developed should cover the requirements of the full range of stakeholders (including users, affected bystanders and manufacturers etc) over the complete lifetime of the product.
My work in ITU addresses the priorities of the call pertaining to smart cities and communities, technologies and services for smart and efficient energy use, and citizen centric digital public services and EMC radiation.
My work to date has been seeking to promote trustworthiness through fundamental rights protections in European harmonised technical standards concerning AI, in particular JTC21.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a key component of the Rolling Plan for ICT standardisation, supporting the European Commission’s Standardisation Request issued to back the AI Act. My contribution is aligned with the objectives of the AI Key Enablers, particularly in the areas of Cybersecurity in AI and the Data Economy.
The priority of my activity is the coordination of the 3GPP activities to update the ITU-R Recommendations on IMT-Advanced and IMT-2020.
There is currently no standard addressing the cybersecurity of AI systems. In ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27 WG4 27090 is under development; and I contribute directly to this work.
In the framework of this fellowship, I contribute to several different standardisation activities, including: addressing minor edits to IEEE 2089.1 and developing a Certification Scheme with IEEE, applying to IEEE CTSoc/ETSC to form a study group to develop a PAR on Parental Consent, participation in BSI IST/33/5 and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27 WG5 re ISO 27566 Parts 1, 2 and 3, ETSI STF 681 Age Verification Expert Member.