Strengthening raw material traceability: Spherity’s role in the MaDiTraCe project

Revealing what it takes to build a transparent and trustworthy supply chain for critical raw materials.

As Europe pushes forward with its green and digital transformation, securing sustainable access to critical raw materials (CRMs), such as lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements, is more important than ever. These materials are essential to technologies like electric vehicle batteries, renewable energy systems, and digital infrastructure.

But sourcing them responsibly is no simple task.

Today’s CRM supply chains are often fragmented and opaque, making it difficult to trace materials back to their origins or prove compliance with environmental and ethical standards. Without trustworthy data, achieving responsible sourcing, enabling circular economy models, and meeting regulatory requirements is virtually impossible.

That’s where the MaDiTraCe project comes in, with Spherity providing a crucial part of the digital trust infrastructure.

Introducing MaDiTraCe: Making critical raw material traceability real

MaDiTraCe (Material and Digital Traceability for Raw Materials) is an EU-funded project involving 14 partners across 7 countries over a 3-year period. Its mission is to improve both the material and digital traceability of key critical raw materials, including cobalt, lithium, natural graphite, and neodymium (Rare Earth Element).

These materials are especially vital for electric vehicle batteries and motors—products increasingly subject to strict EU sustainability regulations such as the Battery Regulation, Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), and the upcoming Critical Raw Materials Act.

MaDiTraCe aims to create a trusted system where raw materials can be traced from extraction to end use, combating fraud, supporting due diligence, and enabling compliance.

Spherity’s contribution: Powering trust through digital identity and verifiable credentials

Spherity contributes its expertise in decentralized identity and verifiable credentials to MaDiTraCe, two key technologies that make digital trust scalable across supply chains.

1. Decentralized Identity for supply chain actors

Spherity equips supply chain participants, such as miners, refiners, auditors, and manufacturers, with digital wallets in which they can store their enterprise credentials. Enterprise credentials are government-issued digital IDs for organizations, and these identities prove who is acting in the supply chain, enabling data accountability and legal attribution.

2. Verifiable credentials for trusted data

Using these digital wallets, stakeholders can issue and share verifiable credentials, cryptographically signed data records that can’t be faked or altered. These credentials can include:

• Certification results

• Material fingerprint analyses

• Non-conformity alerts

• ESG performance data

Whether issued by a lab, auditor, or certification body, each credential is tamper-proof and traceable to a verified source.

Together, these tools ensure that every action, claim, and certificate in the supply chain is trustworthy, audit-ready, and machine-verifiable.

Enabling the Digital Product Passport

A Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a digital record that stores verified information about a product’s origin, composition, and environmental footprint throughout its lifecycle. It enables traceability and regulatory compliance by linking physical products to trustworthy, machine-readable data (read more about Digital Product Passports). As such, the DPP is a key tool in supporting circular economy goals under EU sustainability regulations, including the Battery Regulation and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation.

In the MaDiTraCe project, the DPP plays a central role in making raw material traceability not just possible, but verifiable. Spherity contributes to this by providing the digital trust infrastructure that ensures every piece of information recorded in the DPP can be traced back to a reliable and authenticated source.

Rather than relying on siloed data or unverifiable claims, the DPP allows data from multiple stakeholders, such as raw material suppliers, laboratories, certifiers, and manufacturers, to be integrated into a single, secure, and verifiable record. This is made possible through decentralized identity and verifiable credentials. Each actor in the supply chain receives a digital identity that confirms who they are, and when organizations contribute information, such as a compliance certificate or test result, they issue it as a verifiable credential. This is a digitally signed, tamper-proof data record whose origin can be traced back to the issuer's digital identity.

This approach creates a high level of accountability. Every credential can be independently verified without relying on central intermediaries. More importantly, it ensures that all data within the DPP is both authentic and audit-ready, giving manufacturers, regulators, and downstream partners a reliable source of truth.

For supply chain actors, this means improved collaboration, greater visibility, and reduced risk of fraud or non-compliance. Instead of manual paperwork or uncertain declarations, they can rely on a DPP filled with data that has been cryptographically secured and attributed to verified sources. As regulatory pressure increases, especially around responsible sourcing and sustainability disclosures, having access to such trusted digital records will become a critical part of doing business in Europe’s evolving industrial landscape.

MaDiTraCe in action: From physical material to digital trust

A major challenge in raw material traceability is establishing a reliable, tamper-evident link between the physical material and its digital record. If this link is broken or forged, supply chains remain vulnerable to fraud, substitution, or data manipulation.

The MaDiTraCe project tackles this challenge by combining material fingerprinting, a scientific method to verify the physical origin of raw materials, with a decentralized digital trust architecture built on verifiable credentials.

In a typical use case, a supplier sends a sample of a raw material to a certified laboratory for analysis. The project’s designated certified laboratory is BRGM. BRGM applies the material fingerprinting method by comparing the chemical composition of the raw material to its secure reference database and calculates the likelihood that the sample matches its claimed origin. BRGM issues a verifiable credential for its analytical results, a digitally signed and tamper-proof statement that confirms the coherency of the material’s origin. This credential is then linked to the material’s Digital Product Passport.

This system ensures that anyone down the line, a manufacturer, auditor, or regulator, can independently verify both the authenticity of the data and the credibility of its issuer. In one example, a battery manufacturer sourcing cobalt could request a fingerprint analysis from a lab, receive a validated credential through the DPP, and use it to determine whether the batch meets their compliance requirements. If inconsistencies are found in multiple cases, a “red flag” credential can be issued to alert downstream actors and trigger corrective action.

By connecting scientific analysis with verifiable digital credentials, MaDiTraCe builds a continuous, auditable record of material provenance—laying the groundwork for more ethical, resilient, and transparent supply chains.

Current works and future milestones for Spherity in MaDiTraCe

Spherity’s contribution to the MaDiTraCe project is the development and testing of a Digital Product Passport that combines material data,  material fingerprinting credentials for origin checks, and third-party sustainability certifications, such as the CERA 4in1 scheme. CERA 4in1 certification is a product of DMT, and Spherity contributes to the digital trust infrastructure by allowing this certification to be securely linked to the DPP as a verifiable credential.

This pilot will demonstrate how scientific verification and certified ESG performance data can be combined within a single digital framework. Not only will this strengthen the trustworthiness of responsible sourcing claims, but it will also streamline the way manufacturers and regulators access and verify critical information.

Spherity is also involved in the Red Flag and Certification Governance use case, which expands the DPP to include alerts about non-conformities. When a discrepancy is detected, a red-flag credential can be issued and automatically shared through the DPP. This allows authorities and downstream actors to respond swiftly and transparently, ensuring that the integrity of the supply chain is continuously upheld.

These activities directly support the goals of the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, the Battery Regulation, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D). All of these frameworks emphasize the importance of secure traceability, ethical sourcing, and verifiable compliance.

Building digital trust at scale

Ultimately, Spherity’s work in MaDiTraCe is part of a broader vision: creating a scalable, interoperable trust infrastructure for industrial supply chains. By combining decentralized identity, verifiable credentials, and secure data exchange protocols, Spherity enables organizations to collaborate more effectively, share data with confidence, and meet the growing demand for sustainability and compliance.

The transition to greener and more transparent supply chains requires more than just good intentions; it requires verifiable proof. Spherity helps make that possible by embedding digital trust into the core of supply chain interactions for traceability.

How your business can benefit from verifiable traceability and find new opportunities with Digital Product Passports

Ensuring the responsible sourcing of critical raw materials isn’t just a regulatory obligation; it’s a foundational step toward building resilient, ethical, and future-proof supply chains. But to move from intention to impact, we need tools that make trust verifiable at every step.

Spherity provides those tools. Through decentralized identity and verifiable credentials, we help connect certified actors, authentic data, and transparent compliance workflows, laying the groundwork for a new standard in supply chain traceability.

The MaDiTraCe project is already showing what’s possible. To stay informed or explore how your organization can benefit from verifiable digital trust, visit our website or contact the Spherity team. Together, we can build the digital backbone of tomorrow’s sustainable supply chains.

Note: This article was created using artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) and may include automatically generated text