15 May 2025, Valencia, Spain – Gaia-X has successfully concluded Market-X & Expo and Tech-X & Hackathon #8, held on 13–14 May 2025 in Valencia, Spain, in partnership with Gaia-X Hub Spain. The two-day event brought together business leaders, technology experts, and community partners to explore the latest advances in open-source implementation of a universal Trust Framework for digital ecosystems and data spaces, reinforcing Gaia-X’s commitment to building trust between ecosystem participants, their services or data sharing interactions, and with other ecosystems.
Participants had the opportunity to engage in live technology showcases, marketplace discussions, and hackathon challenges designed to advance the Gaia-X ecosystem. From business matchmaking to hands-on technical implementation, the event strengthened the bridge between market needs and technological capabilities.
Ulrich Ahle, CEO of Gaia-X, emphasised the importance of connecting business and technology to achieve Gaia-X’s digital ambitions on a global scale: “Market-X and Tech-X in Valencia have demonstrated the growing maturity of the Gaia-X ecosystem. From live implementations to marketplace discussions, the event showed that Gaia-X is not just a vision but a reality. We thank our partners, especially Gaia-X Hub Spain, for making this milestone possible.”
Daniel Sáez Domingo, Director Gaia-X Spain Hub and Strategic Intelligence Director, ITI, and co-host organisation of the conference has also declared that “A very good collection of examples of projects that are running now and using Gaia-X and willing to use Gaia-X. It’s important to have a collection of companies that are Gaia-X compliant. It has been a very interesting event, with more attendance than expected at the beginning. Im happy to see a lot of key players here working in also in a practical and applied way rather than just business. In Market-X we have see good practices and facts about the deployment of the Gaia-X Framework in different sectors here in Spain and Europe.”
Highlights of the event include the new releases of the Compliance Document and the Architecture Document, as well as the Data Transfer Agent Connector and the Aerospace Ecosystem Position Paper.
Gaia-X presented the next evolution of its Compliance Document 25.03 and Policy Rules Committee (PRC) White Paper, introducing mechanisms for Geographical and Domain-Specific Extensions. Additionally, Gaia-X announced the operationalisation of Label Levels 2 and 3, providing concrete pathways for higher trust levels, including European data residency, sovereign control, and resilience against non-European jurisdictional risks.
Roland Fadrany, COO of Gaia-X, highlighted the collaborative spirit that drives the ecosystem forward: “We have established a good framework for Standard Compliance and Labels. Now, the next step is growing. Growing, however, comes in two directions: horizontally – in geographical extensions that support global supply chains like Japan, Korea, Canada, and Switzerland, and in domain-specific sectors – like healthcare and the aerospace industry. We need to have specific criteria that ecosystems can automatically check and there will be more autonomy in the definition of criteria than it is in the strict compliance. This is the framework that we are enabling with the scenarios for vertical extensions”.
These developments mark a major step toward making Gaia-X Labels a practical tool for organisations seeking to demonstrate trusted, sector-specific, and geographically aligned data services.
Gaia-X has officially presented the new release of the Architecture Document 25.05. This fully refactored version offers a more transparent and more actionable structure. The updated document includes:
- Understanding the Gaia-X Digital Ecosystem: Provides an overview of ecosystems, data spaces, Gaia-X positioning, and alignment with external standards and associations.
- Trust Framework Architecture: Explains how to operationalise trust in data ecosystems, covering interoperability, conceptual models, and trustworthy data space architectures.
- Implementation of Trusted Data Transactions: Details the Data Product conceptual model, data licensing, and Data Usage Agreements.
- Technical Compatibility Specifications: Defines the requirements for Gaia-X compatibility, ensuring consistency and trust across implementations.
These advancements further position Gaia-X as Europe’s operational framework for trusted data spaces and digital ecosystems, helping businesses to implement real-world solutions based on open standards.
Christoph F. Strnadl, CTO of Gaia-X, summarizes the current technical state-of-affairs of Gaia-X: “Thanks to the excellent work of the whole Gaia-X community, we can honestly state that – as of today – the available specifications (e.g., Architecture Document 25.05) and software components provide a reliable operationalization of the Gaia-X Trust Framework. I observed, amongst others, two interesting threads: First, increasingly, technical topics are directly linked to business use cases, and secondly, we got a lot of new ideas, for instance around AI or additional software implementations. which we are happy to discuss in our on-going technical roadmapping exercise. To me, this signals a healthy and forward-looking spirit guided by our (unofficial) motto: «trust, but verify»!”
During the event, Gaia-X announced the release of the Data Transfer Agent, a collaborative effort to deliver an efficient, secure, resilient, and scalable agent for decentralised data transfers compliant with Gaia-X principles. A joint proposal from Dawex – Data Exchange Technology, IMT Transfert/TeraLab and Gaia-X CTO Office.
The Position Paper of the Gaia-X Aerospace Ecosystem, titled “Data Spaces for a Sustainable Aerospace Industry,” was presented, written in collaboration with the Gaia-X Hub Germany, the Gaia-X project’s COOPERANTS, and the Gaia-X Association. Key contributors include Germany’s Aerospace domain leads, Dr. Caroline Lange and Arno Scheidereiter, alongside Frederic Sutter, the AISBL Aerospace Ecosystem Lead.
The paper highlights the strengths and potential of a shared sustainable data space for aerospace and calls for its implementation. It outlines a unified vision and provides actionable recommendations for the future.
Hackathon Winners Real-World Solutions:
One of the highlights of Tech-X in Valencia was Hackathon #8, where developers, data architects, and technology enthusiasts from across Europe gathered to tackle real-world interoperability and trust challenges using the Gaia-X Trust Framework and Architecture.
After two days of intense collaboration and technical problem-solving, three winning teams were recognised for their outstanding contributions on the following projects:
- 1st Place: ODRL Evaluation Library – The project leveraged the semantic web and graph technologies to perform policy reasoning using ODRL policies
- 2nd Place: Extending the GAIA-X Digital Clearing House: Automated RDF & SHACL and Driven Certification for Marketplace Access – The project automated the process of certification, in our Hack tailored specifically towards certifications where the body of evidence is self reported.
- 3rd Place: Data Space On-Boarding with Gaia-X Credentials – This project automated on-boarding to dataspaces using a step-by-step guide using Gaia-X Credentials.
Looking Ahead
Following the success of Market-X and Tech-X in Valencia, Gaia-X will continue to expand its collaboration with national hubs, industry partners, and standardisation bodies to accelerate the adoption of trusted data exchange and service interactions across sectors. With a growing portfolio of real-world use cases, Gaia-X is proving that Europe’s digital sovereignty is not just a political ambition but a market reality.
For more information, visit https://gaia-x.eu.