Developing a cohesive Digital Single Market (DSM) in Europe is complex due to the fragmented landscape of national research projects, industry initiatives, and EU-level efforts. Legal and ethical challenges arise from competition law, intellectual property, data protection, and privacy regulations. The lack of trusted and secure platforms and privacy-aware analytics methods for sharing personal, proprietary, and industrial data hampers the creation of a viable data market and economy, confining most data sharing to open data. This trend will persist if differing technical standards, quality levels, and legal frameworks are allowed to diverge uncontrollably, undermining interoperability, trust, and cross-border collaboration.

The TRUSTS project addressed these challenges by building a secure, GDPR-compliant data sharing platform based on two major national initiatives: Data Market Austria and Industrial Data Space. Acting both independently and as a federator, TRUSTS integrated platforms across jurisdictions, supported privacy-aware analytics (e.g. multi-party computation), and ensured legal and ethical compliance across the data chain. It involved six companies across three use cases and included universities, SMEs, and national multipliers to ensure long-term sustainability. TRUSTS fostered trust through transparency, stakeholder engagement, and a clear business model, helping to establish a unified European Data Market grounded in secure and trustworthy data exchanges.