The DPP Resolver: Verify Any Product’s Digital Passport

A Digital Product Passport is only as good as your ability to read it and trust it. The DPP Resolver is the layer that turns a folio or a scan into a verifiable record anyone can check — and it decides, precisely, who gets to see what.

What the DPP Resolver does

Every product carries an identifier — a folio, a QR code, a GS1 Digital Link. The Resolver takes that identifier and returns the product’s live Digital Product Passport: its identity, its materials, its lifecycle, and the credentials that back each fact. One scan, one resolved passport, readable on a phone with no app to install. (New to passports? Start with what a Digital Product Passport is.)

Verifiable by anyone — not just by us

A passport you have to take on faith isn’t a passport. Each attested fact in the record is cryptographically signed using did:web identifiers and W3C Verifiable Credentials, so an independent third party — a buyer, a customs officer, a recycler — can verify it without contacting the issuer and without trusting a proprietary system.

We are precise about what that proves, because overclaiming here would defeat the purpose. The signature proves integrity and issuer: that a specific party asserted a specific fact at a specific time, and that the record has not been altered. It does not, by itself, prove that every asserted fact is materially true — that depends on the level of verification behind each fact, which the passport also records and shows. Honesty about that gap is a feature, not a weakness. (More on the mechanism: verifiable credentials for DPPs.)

Three levels of access, by design

Not everyone should see everything. The Resolver enforces least-privilege, multilevel access — the right data to the right party, and nothing more:

• Public. Anyone who scans sees what builds trust: authenticity, material, origin, and the passport’s verification status.
• Owner. The current owner unlocks a private layer tied to their specific piece.
• Circular-economy actors. Verified repairers, remanufacturers, resellers and recyclers get exactly the fields their role needs to act — and the right to write the events they perform.

This is not a privacy afterthought; it is what makes a passport safe to publish and useful across a product’s whole life. It also aligns with the data-access and portability rights the EU Data Act is putting in place.

Portable and interoperable, on open standards

A passport locked inside one vendor’s platform is a liability. The Resolver speaks open standards end to end, so the record travels:

• GS1 EPCIS 2.0 for lifecycle events, as a portable document — the open supply-chain event standard.
• Self-describing XML and a PDF with the data embedded, so the passport is readable by machines and by people, offline if needed.
• GS1 Digital Link as the scannable identifier, and W3C Verifiable Credentials as the trust layer.

Full lifecycle — including verifiable second life

The passport begins when a piece is created and does not stop at the sale. It records the chain — created and finished by hand, registered, published, sold, shipped, delivered — and then keeps going into what most systems ignore: the second life. Repair, remanufacture, resale and recycling are captured as verifiable events, written by the verified actors who perform them. A piece resold years later carries its full lineage; a recycler at end-of-life can read exactly what it is made of. That continuity is where circular value actually lives.

ESPR-ready — built to export into the EU

The EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR, 2024/1781) will require Digital Product Passports by product category. The Resolver is built on the identifiers, data carriers and interfaces those rules point to, and it is bilingual (ES/EN) for cross-border consumer access. For a business that wants to sell into the EU, that means arriving compliant instead of scrambling at the deadline. (Deep dives: our ESPR explainers.)

See it resolve, live

This is in production, not on a roadmap. A real product passport — issued for a hand-made silver piece, signed and resolvable — is public right now: open a live passport →. It is the operating demonstrator behind GovGDS: the jewelry line proves the architecture is real, and the same Resolver is product-agnostic. See how design provenance works on a real piece: proving a piece came from its exact design file.