UNICITY LABS AND ALETHEIA TECHNOLOGIES CHINA LAUNCH A DIGITAL PRODUCT PASSPORT SERVICE FOR THE CHINA–EU CORRIDOR

Unicity Labs, the cryptographic infrastructure company behind the Unicity protocol, and Aletheia Technologies China today announced a Digital Product Passport (DPP) service purpose-built for Chinese manufacturers exporting to the European Union, deployed as a registry-listed DPP service provider under the EU's newly operational Digital Product Passport framework.

In July 2026 the European Commission's DPP Registry went live, and Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778, the operating rules for that registry, came into force in August 2026. From 18 February 2027, every EV, light-transport, and industrial battery above 2 kWh placed on the EU market must carry a Digital Product Passport, with textiles, electronics, and other categories following under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. For the world's largest manufacturing base, the passport is no longer a concept on a roadmap. It is a condition of EU market access, with a hard date.

Under the EU framework, the passport's data is not held in a central government database. It is hosted by the manufacturer or by a verified DPP service provider authorized to operate passports on the manufacturer's behalf and listed on the Commission's public registry. This is the role Unicity Labs and Aletheia are taking: an EU-recognized operator of digital product passports for the China–EU corridor.

Every DPP approach on the market today produces, at bottom, a signed document. A qualified seal proves who asserted the data. A qualified timestamp proves when. Neither proves the one property that makes a passport a passport rather than a document: that exactly one current, authoritative version of it exists.

A signed, timestamped file copies perfectly. A cloned passport carrying valid seals verifies as authentic — everywhere, forever. That is the fraud surface regulators and buyers care about most: duplicated passports laundering grey-market or counterfeit cells, stale passports concealing repair and degradation history at resale and second-life, warranty claims made against forked records.

The joint service closes that gap.

Each battery is represented as a Unicity uniqueness token. Every lifecycle event - production, assembly, state-of-health update, repair, resale — is a cryptographic state transition of that token, and Unicity's protocol layer accepts exactly one successor per state. The consequence is concrete: a legitimate update advances the token to its next state; an attempt replayed from a cloned or stale copy is refused at the protocol level, and the stale copy is detectable by anyone, offline, from the proof alone.

Data commits in China as it is created; the eIDAS qualified seal and timestamp ride on top of Unicity's published root sequence; a verifier in the EU checks a self-contained proof with no call back to any system — and a cloned passport can never produce a valid proof.

On top of this uniqueness layer, the service applies the eIDAS 2.0 qualified trust services the EU legally requires — qualified electronic seals for legal attribution and RFC 3161 qualified timestamps — so passports are admissible under European law from day one. The result is a passport with properties no signature scheme alone can offer:

• One battery, one passport. Uniqueness enforced cryptographically, not administratively.
• Tiered disclosure. Public, restricted, and authority-only data commit independently; each verifier sees only the tier it is entitled to.
• Standards-native. Unit-level GS1 identifiers (GTIN + serial) bind permanently into each token at creation, QR data carriers resolve via GS1 Digital Link, and identifiers register with the EU DPP Registry — no deviation from the mandated flow.

Aletheia brings the on-the-ground integration: connecting the service to manufacturers' existing MES and PLM systems, onboarding upstream suppliers tier by tier, and supporting China's own emerging national DPP framework alongside EU requirements. Suppliers anchor their data independently at the moment of formation, without exposing it to other parties or waiting on anyone downstream; the exporting manufacturer composes the full passport at assembly.

Crucially, nothing eIDAS-critical leaves China. The manufacturer's data stays in its own systems; only a cryptographic hash crosses the border to be sealed. It is a compliance path that respects data sovereignty on both sides — and one whose proofs remain verifiable even if a provider, a server, or a relationship does not survive the decade.

"Chinese manufacturers don't have a data problem — they have a trust-portability problem," said Mike Gault, CEO and founder of Unicity Labs. "The data exists; what's missing is a way to make it verifiable in Europe, decades from now, without anyone having to trust — or even reach — the systems it came from. A signed file can't do that; it copies. A uniqueness token can: it proves there is one authoritative passport, and it proves it to anyone, offline, forever. Becoming a registry-listed operator lets us deliver that inside the EU's own rules, not alongside them."

"The battery passport forces a hard question that a signature alone cannot answer: across a ten-year lifecycle and a cross-border supply chain, which record do you trust when AI generated content can fabricate any of them?" said Tan Jian, CEO Aletheia Technologies

The service is onboarding manufacturers now, ahead of the 18 February 2027 battery mandate, and will extend to textiles, electronics, and further categories as ESPR delegated acts enter into force.

Unicity Labs builds cryptographic infrastructure for verifiable computation, a cryptographic proof system providing uniqueness, integrity, and time proofs that are hash-based, post-quantum, and verifiable offline by anyone, indefinitely.

Aletheia (爱立示) builds cryptographic infrastructure for data integrity and trust, technology providing authenticity, integrity, and timestamping proofs that are hash-based, post-quantum secure, and independently verifiable by anyone, indefinitely.