The TANGO EU project successfully concluded in 2025, marking a significant step forward for Europe’s data economy. In 2022, 37 leading organizations joined forces for the Horizon Europe project TANGO (Digital Technologies Acting as a Gatekeeper to information and data flows). Over the course of three years, TANGO developed crucial digital solutions and governance frameworks to ensure data sovereignty, trust, and sustainability.
This directly advances the European single market for data and supports the development of interoperable, trustworthy data spaces. By helping to unlock data silos securely and efficiently, the project lays the groundwork for enhanced innovation and competitiveness across sectors.
TANGO delivered seven pilot projects, reflecting the following pillars:
- Trustworthy, accountable and privacy-preserving data-sharing technologies and platforms.
- Data governance models and frameworks supporting data sovereignty and compliance (e.g. GDPR).
- Improved data availability, quality and interoperability across domains and sectors.
- Energy consumption optimisation at the infrastructure, application and AI inference level to support green digital operations.
norbloc and Visaright
norbloc was actively engaged in the Public Administration Pilot with Visaright Gmbh. This pilot drastically improves the service delivery (VISA application) by benefitting administrations and citizens with a paperless process built on a secure data management architecture, thereby also reducing the use of resources.
The challenge at hand related to the administrative burden faced by third-country nationals applying for visas or relocating to EU countries. Here citizens relinquish the greatest control over their data, while governments struggle to enforce uniform protection across systems and borders.
Authorities are required to process vast amounts of personal information under complex and overlapping European, national, and institutional legal frameworks. Visa decisions are increasingly informed by digitally gathered data beyond traditional documentation. Yet many immigration offices still depend on siloed, paper-based or semi-digital workflows. Cross-checking this data across agencies and jurisdictions is inefficient, while the reliance on third-party software further increases privacy risks.
As a solution, the VISAR platform powered by norbloc’s Fides solution acts as the central hub for onboarding, processing, and reviewing visa applications. Employers and relocation employees submit required data through Fides, while public administration staff from bodies such as immigration offices or federal employment agencies evaluate, approve, or request additional documentation.
norbloc’s TANGO pilot ensures that:
- Each actor (employer, applicant, case manager, public authority) is authenticated and authorized via secure onboarding and verified identity (ePassPort, SSI)
- All sensitive data is managed via role-based policies and verified checkmarks, ensuring clarity on data origin and validation,
- The final visa application status is communicated securely to all involved parties, maintaining data traceability and integrity.
For IT and data protection officers, TANGO provides dedicated tools such as the Privacy and Ethics Checker (PEC) to proactively assess privacy risks and ensure regulatory compliance when handling sensitive relocation data.
Moreover, norbloc’s innovative blockchain-based data sharing and TANGO’s cross-border capabilities support seamless data portability and revocability for applicants, allowing individuals to retain control of their information and enforce their data rights in a consistent, transparent manner.
More about the TANGO Project
Additionally, in its aim to build a one-of-a-kind platform, providing trustworthy data management and sharing, deployed in federated, distributed, multi-cloud environments that ensure data sovereignty, governance and provenance for public/private organizations, while also empowering citizens to maintain control of their data, TANGO accomplished many objectives:
- Blockchain-based data storage and sharing
- Trustworthy data sharing
- Confidentiality and privacy by design
- Self-encryption and Decryption Techniques with Multi-Factor Information Recovery Mechanisms
- Self-sovereign identity management
- Seamless onboarding for users and devices
- User device continuous behavioural authentication
- Device Continuous Behavioural Authentication
- Hardening against side-channel attacks
- Exploratory data analysis engine
- Energy efficient AI model training
- Dynamic Intelligent Execution on Heterogeneous Systems
- Privacy Threat Modelling & Identification for Trustworthy AI
- X-AI for Privacy and Trust Enhancement
- AI-based Infrastructure Management
To learn more about each of the above objectives click here.
About norbloc
norbloc is a Swedish company founded in 2016 and specialized in secure and legally compliant sharing of KYC data. As part of the TANGO project, norbloc will provide its data sharing platform Fides, which is a distributed, privacy-preserving, fair and accountable data storage and sharing platform that enables the exchange of highly confidential data in a secure and sovereign manner. Fides allows the sharing of regulated data couples with its attestation/validation stamps in an environment that immutably records all actions, the most important being consent from the data owner. Any type of legally sensitive data can be shared through the platform between any accredited participant.
