IOTA Gains Official Recognition in China’s 2025 Self-Sovereign Identity Report

• IOTA has been highlighted as a leading SSI use case built on DIDs in the 2025 policy paper by China’s Ministry of Commerce.
• The combination of IOTA’s feeless, immutable ledger with W3C’s identity standards creates the perfect infrastructure for DPPs.

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Salima, a tech enthusiast and cryptocurrency supporter, recently spotted IOTA’s name in a major report. In a post on X, she explained that the document was the 2025 Technical Development Report on Digital Product Passports (DPP), published by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology together with the China National Institute of Standardization.

The report highlights how the Digital Product Passport (DPP) is emerging as both a cutting-edge technical tool and a management framework. For China, Digital Product Passports are being looked at as a way to push manufacturing into a smarter, greener, more advanced era.

At the same time, they’re expected to shake things up in trade, data sharing across borders, and even how companies deal with compliance. The European Union has already taken a step, with its Sustainable Products Ecodesign Regulation kicking in back in July 2024.

One of the interesting sections of the report focuses on Data Identification Technology: Uniqueness and Scalability, which it describes as the heart of DPP. Here, the authors identify two main approaches being explored worldwide.

They specifically highlight that: “The W3C DID standard supports cross-chain interoperability, and IOTA’s self-sovereign identity (SSI) solution is a prime example. It allows users to control their own identifiers, preventing monopolization by centralized platforms.” The alternative to DIDs is centralized identifiers like VAA or GS1.

IOTA’s Part to Play in DPP

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the same body that standardizes web protocols and has developed the Decentralized Identifier (DID) standard. DIDs are cryptographic identifiers that are not tied to centralized authorities like governments or corporations. Instead, they’re under the full control of the individual or organization that owns them.

By integrating with Verifiable Credentials (VCs), DIDs make it possible to prove facts about a product, company, or person without exposing sensitive data.

For example, a product passport could confirm that a battery meets EU recycling requirements without revealing the full manufacturing dataset. The cross-chain interoperability built into W3C’s DID standard ensures that identifiers and credentials can work across different blockchains and platforms, crucial in a global ecosystem where data must move freely.

Self-sovereign identity takes the W3C DID standard one step further. It’s about putting full control of identity into the hands of the individual or organization, not governments, not corporations. Think of Object ID as an example: it gives every product its own verifiable digital identity.

Only the domain owner can create that identity, which means counterfeit issuers and unauthorized smart contracts get locked out. It’s a way to make sure that when you’re looking at an identity, you know it’s the real deal.

IOTA operates on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) known as the Tangle. As highlighted in our last analysis on Tangle, this design removes the need for miners, which means transactions are feeless, a critical advantage for real-world use cases like Digital Product Passports, where vast amounts of microtransactions might be required to verify supply chain data, track recycling records, or prove sustainability credentials.

Companies don’t have to worry about unpredictable gas fees, as often seen on Ethereum. Additionally, the way IOTA’s network is built ensures that once information is recorded, it remains locked in for good, with no edits or tampering. That kind of immutability is what gives regulators, auditors, and even consumers the confidence that the data they’re looking at is authentic and trustworthy.

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