The Hashgraph Group and Merck announced a collaboration to put an EU Digital Product Passport on Hedera for regulated supply chains, which is a concrete step toward replacing paper trade documentation with a shared digital record.
What A Digital Product Passport Actually Does
A digital product passport is meant to travel with a product through its supply chain and hold verifiable data on origin, materials, compliance, and handling. The European Commission has been running a formal consultation on the rules for service providers and data carriers behind these passports, and that consultation is the actual regulatory anchor here, not any single vendor’s product.
The Hedera Piece
The Hashgraph Group and Merck’s announcement, covered in a PR Newswire release, puts Hedera forward as the ledger recording passport data for a regulated supply chain use case. That is a specific deployment, not a statement that Hedera has been chosen as the EU standard.
Where IOTA Fits, And Where It Doesn’t
IOTA has its own separate work in this space, documented in its article on digital product passports for electronics. It’s a different project on a different ledger, aimed at a different product category. Worth keeping straight: Hedera’s supply chain passport work and IOTA’s electronics passport work are two separate efforts, not one joint initiative, and neither one represents settled EU policy. The EC consultation is still where the actual rules get decided.
Why This Is Worth Tracking
Trade finance and supply chain compliance run on paperwork that is slow, duplicated, and hard to audit across borders. A passport that lives on a ledger and travels with the product gives every party in the chain, from manufacturer to regulator, the same verifiable record instead of separate paper trails that have to be reconciled by hand. Platforms like atma.io, which offers its own digital product passport tooling, show this is becoming a genuine category, not a one-off pilot. Whether Hedera, IOTA, or another ledger ends up carrying the bulk of this data will depend on how the EU’s technical requirements shake out, and that’s still an open question.
Educational only, not tax, legal, or investment advice. Check primary sources and speak with a qualified professional before making financial decisions.
