Verifiable Provenance and the Architecture of Trust

By Marco A. Bravo-Fabián — Candidate for Doctor, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (ICEDE). ORCID 0009-0001-4372-2076.

For most of commercial history, provenance was a matter of trust: a reputable seller, a signed certificate, a name you recognized. Trust is a wonderful thing between people who know each other. It is a terrible foundation for a global, second-hand, cross-border economy — and that is precisely the economy we are building.

Trust does not scale; verification does

The problem with trust is structural, not moral. It degrades with distance and time. A certificate signed by a jeweler you’ve met means something; the same certificate, photographed and forwarded to a buyer three countries and three owners away, means almost nothing. As supply chains lengthen and resale markets globalize, the gap between “someone vouched for this” and “I can check this myself” becomes the difference between a functioning market and a market priced for fraud.

Verifiable provenance closes that gap by changing the question. Not “do you trust the seller?” but “can you check the record?” — a question anyone can answer, without knowing anyone.

What an architecture of trust actually looks like

Replacing trust with verification is not a slogan; it has a concrete architecture, and each layer does one honest job. Identifiers bind a record to a specific physical object. Cryptographic signatures — did:web and W3C Verifiable Credentials — let a third party confirm who asserted what, and when, and that nothing has been altered since. Open standards like GS1 EPCIS 2.0 make the record portable, so it isn’t hostage to any one platform’s survival. Together, these turn a product’s history into something a stranger can independently confirm.

My own research frames the digital product passport as exactly this: a data-governance infrastructure, not a marketing label (Bravo-Fabián, López-Pérez & Vence, 2026, Journal of Cleaner Production, doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2026.148875). The distinction matters, because infrastructure has to be honest to be useful.

The honesty that makes it credible

Here is the part the technology vendors tend to skip. A signature proves integrity and issuer — that a specific party made a specific claim and the record is intact. It does not, by itself, prove that the claim is materially true. A well-built passport does not hide that distinction; it records the level of verification behind each fact — declared, attested, verified, measured — and shows the gap between what is claimed and what is proven. Counterintuitively, showing the gap is what makes the whole system trustworthy. A record that pretends every fact is equally certain is a record you should not trust.

Why this is the foundation, not a feature

Once provenance is verifiable, a cascade of things become possible that trust alone could never support: confident resale, insurable authenticity, financeable circular models, and regulatory compliance that is demonstrated rather than asserted. The resolver layer that makes a passport checkable, and the operating jewelry demonstrator that proves it in production, are early instances of a shift that will reach every category the Ecodesign regulation touches.

The old world asked you to trust. The new one lets you check. That is a better foundation for everyone except the people who were counting on you not looking.