- IOTA made a demo of the Digital Product Passport available to the public, introducing the components of the IOTA Trust Framework.
- Digital product passports are one example, with upcoming EU regulations requiring their use across multiple product areas to reduce fragmentation.
In October, the IOTA network introduced the Trust Framework, a toolkit designed to make digital interactions more secure and verifiable. The team announced on X that anyone interested in how blockchain can be used to track the lifecycle of a product will have the opportunity to explore “under the hood” of the technology.
They say the demo serves as a conceptual reference rather than a completed, regulatory-ready Digital Product Passport solution, highlighting how IOTA components can enable practical use cases such as Digital Product Passports.
For context, we mentioned earlier that the Trust Framework is built around modular components designed to maximize flexibility and functionality. These include IOTA ID, Hierarchy, Notarization, IOTA Gas Station, and Tokenization, each addressing recurring business needs such as product tracking, provenance, trade, and supply chain operations.
These modules can operate independently and can be combined and employed with Move Virtual Machine-powered infrastructure as needed.
DPP demo
This demo begins by outlining the core challenges hindering the growth and efficiency of today’s product ecosystems. It explains that lifecycle data, which is information about a product’s origin, movement, maintenance, and end-of-life, is often locked away in isolated systems that don’t communicate with each other.
As products move through complex supply chains, this data can often be lost, fragmented, or duplicated between different parties. With little incentive to share information, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and recyclers tend to keep data in silos.
A Digital Product Passport (DPP) is essentially a digital file that tracks every stage of a product’s life, from initial design to final recycling. Associated with a unique product ID, capture important details such as technical specifications, repair history, material composition, and compliance data.
With upcoming EU regulations set to make DPP mandatory for many product categories, this approach transforms previously scattered information into a reliable and durable source of truth.
The broader DPP ecosystem involves multiple stakeholders, including manufacturers, distributors, consumers, service providers, recyclers, and extended producer responsibility organizations (EPROs).
Track your electric bike battery
In the demo, an e-bike battery serves as an example product to be tracked. The fictitious manufacturer EcoBike uses IOTA Notarization to register lifecycle events so that the recorded data is stored immutably and can be verified by anyone.
IOTA Notarization can be integrated directly through Rust or WASM libraries, or through Move-based smart contracts. Within this system, EcoBike identifies itself using an IOTA identity, specifically a decentralized identifier (DID) that represents an organization on the IOTA network.
Because products can end up anywhere, manufacturers need a secure way to ensure that only trusted service providers can update their digital passports. EcoBike does this with an on-chain service network using the IOTA hierarchy, assigning roles and privileges through cryptographic credentials and creating a secure and verifiable chain of trust.
This demo raises important questions:
A major challenge in building a useful DPP is motivating stakeholders to participate in this circular economy. Why do service technicians need to document their actions? Why should owners take their products to certified recyclers?
This is where IOTA tokenization comes into play. IOTA opens the door to new business models by representing real-world items as on-chain digital assets, allowing these assets to be easily interacted with wallets, exchanges, and smart contracts, just like regular IOTA tokens.
Rewards are automatically paid when a user takes an action using a digital product passport. Each payment is immutably stored on the IOTA ledger and can be verified through the IOTA Explorer, giving you a tangible incentive to donate.
