Athens, Greece – 29 May 2026: Gaia-X successfully concluded Tech-X & Hackathon #9, held on 28–29 May 2026 in collaboration with Gaia-X Hub Greece, operated by Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems & Automation (LMS). The event highlighted Gaia-X’s evolution from a broad architectural vision toward enabling practical cross-ecosystem interoperability.
One of the highlights of the event was the launch of the Gaia-X Loire Participant Credential Wizard by the Gaia-X Lab Team, a new tool designed to simplify onboarding participants in the Gaia-X ecosystem by enabling the creation and signing of Verifiable Credentials compliant with the Gaia-X Trust Framework.
The event also demonstrated the practical implementation of Gaia-X 3.0 “Danube” across several key dimensions:
Ecosystem level: Participants heard directly from full-fledged data spaces and ecosystems as they presented requirements and technologies and explained why these could only be fulfilled by Danube’s features, like the IMXC (International Manufacturing-X Council) “federated trust” use case, which implements trust between different ecosystems and is supported by the Danube Gaia-X Core Engine and the Gaia-X Meta-Registry. MYRTUS, a project focused on orchestrating the cloud–fog–edge continuum securely and sustainably, showcased the MYRTUS–Gaia-X Danube compliance framework live, illustrating how the project uses Gaia-X Danube to verify whether a partner is eligible to join a MYRTUS cluster, using Gaia-X Verifiable Presentations and Verifiable Credentials.
Technical level: Participants learned how to use ‘Bring Your Own Rules’ (BYOR) concept made easy, using OPA and Rego with Gaia-X Danube, and what the design decisions and open problems are, plugging a Multi-Ecosystem Federation into the Gaia-X Meta-Registry.
Connector level: Danube is all about trust. Various data space connector technologies that incorporated the principles defined in the latest Danube architecture document were showcased, including Eclipse Data Space Components (EDC) with OID4VC: an MVP demonstration; From Standard to Open Source Stack: Implementing Trusted Data Transactions with the Gaia-X Framework and the Data Transfer Agent. The presentation examined how to implement Trusted Data Transactions with the Gaia-X Framework and an open-source implementation example of a Data Transfer Agent.
Compliance DIY Workshop: This interactive session enabled participants to bring their own BYOR requirements and receive direct support from the Gaia-X Lab team in implementing them on the Gaia-X 3.0 Danube platform.
“From a technology perspective, Tech-X and our overfull Hackathon #9 showed that Gaia-X is entering a more mature implementation phase,” said Christoph Strnadl, Chief Technology Officer of Gaia-X. “Danube is important because it makes compliance execution more modular and extensible, while BYOR is imperative because real ecosystems need to combine rules from different domains and custodians. That is the difference between a framework that is described and a framework that is actually automated and operationalisable.”
Hackathon #9 reinforced that implementation focus. The list of hacks included work on re-usable compliance rules, policy- and credential-aware invocation on Gaia-X Danube, agentic automation of trust exchange, and AI-related approaches to sustainable cloud architectures.
Winners were announced on 29 May, with prizes of 5,000 euros for first place, 3,000 euros for second place, and 1,500 euros for third place.
1st place – The Agentic Automation of Trust Exchange in Gaia-X Framework – The hack goal is to create a prototype demonstrating end-to-end agentic trust orchestration for Gaia-X service federations, showing how the Gaia-X trust framework can serve as the trust and policy backbone for AI-mediated, multi-agent service interactions.
2nd place – Selective Disclosure Cross-Jurisdiction Identity Credentials for Gaia-X – Gaia-X’s notary today recognizes only EU-centric identifiers (EORI, EUID, vatID, LEI, taxID), and the entire credential pipeline issues plain JWS, where every claim is either fully visible or absent. Both limitations either exclude participants from outside the EU, or force them to expose more than they need once inside.
3rd place – Policy and Credential-Aware A2A Skill Invocation on Gaia-X Danube – The Proposal to build an end-to-end demonstrator on Gaia-X 3.0 Danube that covers agent to agent (A2A) interaction, VC-based verification of the calling agent, and DUA-based authorization of provider skills. The hack demonstrated how Gaia-X 3.0 Danube can support interoperable agents that handle conditional data utilization across organizational boundaries.
Ulrich Ahle, Chief Executive Officer at Gaia-X, stated, “An important signal from Athens is that the Gaia-X ecosystem is developing practical tooling for different levels of maturity. Not every participant enters with the same technical resources, and that is precisely why reusable rules, shared components and interoperable building blocks matter so much. As a result, trust becomes automated, sovereignty becomes actionable, and Europe’s digital future can be built on solid, shared foundations.”
Kosmas Alexopoulos, Professor at the Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems & Automation (LMS), stated that “The combination of GenAI and Gaia-X Data Spaces creates a new foundation for industrial intelligence: data remains sovereign, collaboration becomes trusted, and AI services can generate actionable insights across companies, factories, and value chains.”
Tech-X Athens, therefore, marked an important milestone in Gaia-X’s 2026 agenda as it showed how governance, compliance and interoperability can be embedded in working components and tested against real use cases. It also built momentum toward the Gaia-X Summit 2026 in Vienna, where the association will continue its focus on “Season 2.0 of Sovereign, Trusted AI & Data Ecosystems”.
Press Contact:
Robert Stefan Goia – Media Relations Manager
Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL
Av. des Arts 6, 1210 Bruxelles
E-mail: robert.goia@gaia-x.eu