On April 6, 2026, SMX (NASDAQ: SMX) launched its Digital Material Passport Platform (DMPP), a blockchain-backed system that creates physical-to-digital identities for plastics, metals, and advanced materials using intrinsic material markers.
It is a meaningful addition to materials traceability and an early signal of how the Digital Product Passport (DPP) category is taking commercial shape. The EU's central ESPR registry (the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, EU Regulation 2024/1781) is expected mid-2026. Commercial products are now shipping into the category. Markets respond to clarity.
Now that the first commercial DPP products are live, a category-level question is urgent: what exactly is being verified, and by whom? The answer separates two infrastructure layers that are increasingly collapsed under a single label.
Two layers, often treated as one
A Digital Product Passport is a container for claims about a product: where its materials came from, what it is made of, how it was produced, what certifications it carries, and what has happened to it over its lifecycle. The passport itself is structure. The claims inside it come from different sources, and each source requires a different kind of verification.
Material identity is about establishing that a physical object is what it is claimed to be. That this particular batch of recycled polyethylene actually contains the percentage of post-consumer content on the label. That this gold ingot actually originated from the mine in the declaration. Verifying material identity requires tying a digital record to the physical good, typically through markers (molecular, chemical, isotopic) that can be read back later.
Certificate verification is about establishing that a claim about that material, typically issued by a third-party certification body, is real, current, and issued by the body that claims to have issued it. A GRS (Global Recycled Standard) certificate. An RJC (Responsible Jewellery Council) Chain-of-Custody certificate. A ResponsibleSteel site certification. These are the certificates that hold the materials economy together. Verifying them requires checking that the certificate record is authentic, unaltered, and still in effect at the moment of the check.
These are different questions with different answers. A system that verifies the material does not also verify the certificate, and vice versa.
Why the distinction matters now
The ESPR requires an open, non-proprietary DPP infrastructure. This is not a stylistic preference. It is written into the law itself, in Article 9 of EU Regulation 2024/1781. If DPP infrastructure is controlled by individual platform operators, the passports take on those operators' weaknesses. If the operator goes down, the passport goes with it. If the operator gets bought or changes its business model, the passport policy changes too.
A proprietary DPP platform can legitimately store material-identity data. But the certifications used as inputs into those passports, including recycled content certificates, responsible sourcing certificates, and composition claims from accredited bodies, still need to be independently verifiable by any party, at any time, without relying on the platform operator that happens to host them. That is a separate design requirement. It is where certification bodies themselves have the greatest exposure.
The risk of conflation
If the market begins to treat "DPP platforms" as interchangeable, two things happen. Buyers mistake material-marker systems for certificate verification and discover mid-audit that the certificate behind a claim was never the thing being checked. Certification bodies watch their certificates become inputs into platforms they do not control, with no independent way for downstream users to verify that a certificate is authentic, current, and unchanged. Neither outcome serves the integrity of the certification industry.
The category is a stack
The DPP category is not a winner-take-all market. It is a stack. Four distinct functions live in that stack: material identity, certificate verification, passport registry, and product-level assembly. Each has its own infrastructure. Each has its own accountable parties. As ESPR, CSRD (the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), the EU Deforestation Regulation, and the FTC Green Guides take force over the next three years, all of these functions will be needed, and regulators will increasingly demand that each one be verifiable on its own terms.
SMX's DMPP addresses material-level identity with a clear technical approach. IntegraLayer addresses certificate-level verification as neutral infrastructure that certification bodies themselves control. The two layers complement each other. The market will benefit from precision about which layer does which work. So will every certification claim that has to survive the next decade of regulatory scrutiny.