Source: European Parliament
Europe is about to attach persistent digital records to physical goods on an industrial scale. Over the coming years, the European Union will introduce Digital Product Passports (part of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation) across a growing range of major industrial sectors, starting with batteries in February 2027 and expanding to most physical consumer and industrial goods placed on the EU market. Products without a compliant passport will risk enforcement action or restrictions on access to the EU market.
DPPs create a coordination problem that traditional platform models struggle to solve. Blockchain-based verification infrastructure can help address this challenge.
What a DPP Contains
A Digital Product Passport attaches structured lifecycle data to a physical item through a carrier such as a QR code or NFC tag. For batteries, this includes product identifiers, manufacturer details, material composition including hazardous substances, verified carbon footprint calculations, performance metrics such as capacity and expected lifetime, and end-of-life information covering reuse and recycling. Similar criteria will be developed for other products. At scale, this translates into billions of data points linked to physical goods.
The passport is not tied to a single transaction but to a continuous lifecycle, from sourcing and manufacturing through distribution, use, repair and end-of-life recovery. This introduces ongoing updates rather than static records.
The regulation does not prescribe a specific technology stack. Instead, it defines system properties such as open standards, interoperability, machine readability and long-term accessibility. That design choice pushes implementations toward neutral verification layers that remain usable even as vendors, platforms and organisations change. Discussions increasingly converge around GS1 Digital Link identifiers, JSON-LD data formats and API-based updates as foundational building blocks rather than entirely new infrastructures. These technical directions are being formalised through CEN/CENELEC Joint Technical Committee 24 (JTC 24), which is developing eight harmonised EU standards for Digital Product Passports.
Why Blockchain Fits
Digital Product Passports introduce a coordination challenge that existing platform models struggle to solve. Supply chains involve competitors, regulators and third-party auditors that must rely on shared verification without delegating control to a single operator. Anti-trust constraints, commercial sensitivities and fragmented infrastructure make full centralisation unrealistic.
Decentralised ledgers become relevant not as replacements for enterprise systems, but as neutral reference layers where independent actors can anchor lifecycle claims without surrendering ownership of their data. Instead of trusting one database, participants verify a shared timeline of attestations that remains accessible even as systems and vendors change.
Transparency in a DPP context does not mean exposing operational data. It means that authorised actors can independently verify when a claim was issued and by whom. Verifiability replaces visibility, and cryptographic anchoring allows lifecycle events to be confirmed without revealing proprietary datasets.
Immutability also needs to be understood differently here. Products evolve, certifications change and lifecycle data must remain dynamic. What persists is the audit trail rather than the underlying dataset. Distributed ledgers preserve the history of claims, updates and revocations over time.
However, blockchain does not guarantee that a claim is true. It ensures that once a claim exists, it can be independently audited later. Governance frameworks, standards and issuer accountability therefore remain central to any DPP ecosystem.
How Blockchain Contributes in Practice
Industrial supply chains are not rebuilding their digital infrastructure from scratch. Manufacturers, logistics providers and recyclers already rely on ERP systems, certification platforms and existing compliance tooling. As a result, most Digital Product Passport implementations follow hybrid architectures, where enterprise systems hold detailed data and blockchain provides a neutral verification layer between actors that do not fully trust each other.
Within these hybrid designs, the verification layer tends to separate identity resolution from data storage. Resolver services link physical identifiers to distributed records, while shared ledgers anchor cryptographic commitments to lifecycle events without storing passport data itself.
Alongside resolver-based architectures, some initiatives explore alternative design paths. One example is tokenisation, where a product or specific lifecycle attributes are represented as digital assets on a shared ledger. In theory, token-based approaches can simplify ownership tracking or lifecycle state transitions, particularly for high-value or uniquely identifiable goods. In practice, their relevance remains context-dependent. Industrial actors often approach full product tokenisation cautiously due to scalability concerns, governance complexity and the need to balance transparency with confidentiality. For many bulk or standardised products, such as generic electronic components or textile fibres that are mixed and redistributed throughout the supply chain, maintaining a one-to-one link between a physical item and a token quickly becomes impractical.
Regardless of the architectural pattern chosen, most implementations converge on similar anchoring strategies. Large sets of product attestations can be anchored on-chain as aggregated commitments, while detailed records remain within enterprise environments. Given expected transaction volumes, many implementations rely on batching or secondary execution layers rather than anchoring every event individually.
When an authorised actor issues a compliance claim, such as a verified carbon footprint calculation, a hash of that record, together with identifiers and timestamps, can be written to a shared ledger. This creates a durable reference point that allows later verification without exposing proprietary operational data. Lifecycle updates, revocations and superseded attestations become equally important for products that remain in circulation for years.
No matter the technical choices, there is a common constraint: privacy. Companies need to prove compliance claims without exposing sensitive operational data, which makes selective disclosure and cryptographic proof systems a structural requirement. Decentralised identifiers and verifiable credentials play a central role in this architecture by allowing specific product attributes or certifications to be shared in a verifiable way while limiting what is revealed to counterparties or regulators. Zero-knowledge proofs extend this model by enabling certain lifecycle claims, such as recycled content thresholds, to be validated without disclosing the underlying datasets. Together, credential-based attestations and privacy-preserving proof systems allow DPP verification layers to scale without turning shared infrastructure into a public data repository.
Early Pilots and the Reality of Adoption
Early industry pilots already explore Digital Product Passport architectures across both permissioned and permissionless rails, including experiments built on Ethereum, Cardano and other distributed ledger infrastructure. These efforts differ in scope and maturity, yet they converge around a similar pattern: operational data stays off chain while shared verification layers anchor long-lived claims.
What many pilots reveal is that technical architecture alone does not determine success. Projects often stall not because the technology fails, but because ecosystems struggle to align around governance, business incentives and regulatory clarity. Collaboration between independent actors, supported by common standards and clear leadership, can prove more decisive than the choice of ledger technology itself.
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The Opportunity for Builders
The opportunity for builders lies not in replacing enterprise systems but in shaping the infrastructure that connects them. Resolver networks, credential frameworks, privacy-preserving proof systems and cross-domain identity layers are moving from experimental primitives into regulatory infrastructure.
As Digital Product Passports expand across sectors, the verification layer around them may become one of Europe’s largest shared digital infrastructures. What starts as regulatory compliance begins to resemble a new kind of protocol layer, where regulation defines the constraints, open standards shape interoperability and decentralised coordination keeps verification portable over time.
Digital Product Passports and the Blockchain Verification Layer was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.