Italy, Sweden and the Czech Republic will share the next one-year presidency of the European Blockchain Partnership, Cointelegraph Italy reported on July 9.

Following a meeting of the European Blockchain Partnership today in Brussels, the three countries took on the one-year presidency, which will last from July 2019 to July 2020.

Marco Bellezza, Legal Advisor to Minister Di Maio for communications and digital innovation and Coordinator of the Italian delegation of the EU Blockchain Partnership, said:

“The Italian Presidency of the EU Blockchain partnership is a first acknowledgment of the activity carried out on this front on the impulse of the Minister Luigi Di Maio, with a view to giving Italy a leadership role in the European projects on Blockchain. This is a unique opportunity to further promote the knowledge and use of this technology for the benefit of citizens and businesses by strengthening cooperation within the EU.”

Italy joined the European Blockchain Partnership last September. The partnership is an entity promoted by European Commission five months earlier as a “vehicle for cooperation amongst Member States to exchange experience and expertise in technical and regulatory fields and prepare for the launch of EU-wide [blockchain] applications across the Digital Single Market for the benefit of the public and private sectors.”

In February, the Italian House of Representatives approved a bill defining distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain. At the time, Maria Laura Mantovani, a member of the Italian Parliament in the Movimento 5 Stelle party, told Cointelegraph Italy that a favorable use case for blockchain is its application in online voting.

Last month, the Italian Banking Association announced that Italy’s banks will integrate DLT into internal processes to boost settlements. The deployment of blockchain is also set to improve transparency in transactions between banks and efficiency of communication between counterparties.