I spent two days at the Nordic Blockchain Conference (NBC26) in Stockholm last month, and if the event settled anything, it is that blockchain is here to stay. The financial industry has made its choice: tokenised assets, regulated stablecoins and institutional settlement are moving into production across Europe. So, the question echoing across the main stage was no longer whether the technology works, but where it goes from here. My answer is the sector almost nobody mentions in the same breath: food. It is the industry that has been asking the same question for a decade with no good answer: who carries the cost of a broken system, and what would it take to fix it?
The Problem Is Economic, Not Technical
Europe’s food system is fragmented in a way that is not, at root, a data or technology problem. It is an economic one. The farmers and cooperatives capture the least value and hold the least institutional trust, yet they shoulder the compliance burden of every regulation written in Brussels.
Traceability products have been sold into that gap for a decade on the same promise: visibility, trust, provenance. And the reality has been the same too: they work for one flagship pilot and collapse the moment you extend them across an industry operating on thin margins, because they never touched the economics. They added cost to the people who could least afford it.
How CommonSource Is Different
CommonSource started from the economics. It is a unified digital identity and governance layer connecting stakeholders across European food networks.
Every participant has their own sovereign identity. Every farm-gate event is recorded as a verifiable credential, settled on BSV Blockchain. Every step in the supply chain carries a cryptographic attestation of who did what, when and under what conditions. Not just the headline batches. Every step.
Sub-cent transaction fees and unbounded on-chain scaling are the prerequisites that make this work.
That is the difference. The value and the trust that small producers were locked out of finally accrue to them, because the same event that proves provenance is the one that lets them capture it.
Regulation Is the On-Ramp, Not the Destination
Digital Product Passports, ESPR, the Battery Regulation, CBAM: the regulatory wave is real, and it is a genuine driver. But as it stands, compliance is a tax levied on the weakest actors in the chain. Every new rule piles more obligation onto the producers who already capture the least.
Digital Product Passports are where that tension becomes concrete. They are the verifiable data layer through which products will prove origin, composition and compliance across the whole regulatory stack. BSV Association, as a member of Blockchain for Europe, co-authored the May 2026 Fraunhofer joint paper, Blockchain Enabled Digital Product Passports for Circular Supply Chains, examining how blockchain-enabled passports make that layer trustworthy, interoperable and affordable for the producers who have to feed it.
CommonSource inverts that. When every participant already holds a verified digital identity and every event is already captured as a tamper-proof record, compliance stops being a separate burden and becomes a byproduct of being on the rails. The same farm-gate record that satisfies a Digital Product Passport is the one that lets a cooperative finally hold its own trust and value. Compliance becomes the receipt, not the cost.
That is why regulation is the beginning, not the end. It gets producers onto the infrastructure. What happens once they are on it is the point: the redistribution of value and trust toward the people who grow the food.
Food Is the Hardest Case, Not the Warm-Up
It is tempting to treat food as the small proof that clears the way for the big prize: population-scale digital identity, eIDAS 2.0 and EUDI wallets. That gets it backwards. Fragmented, low-margin, low-trust actors carrying a heavy compliance load are the hardest test any infrastructure can face. The wallet standards, verifiable credentials and public ledger that make CommonSource work for a cooperative in the Netherlands are the same architecture that could sit underneath the EU’s Digital Product Passport framework and any serious attempt at population-scale identity. If it holds for farms on thin margins, the institutional cases follow.
The Window Is Short
Look at what converges over the next eighteen months. MiCA full enforcement arrives 1 July 2026. eIDAS 2.0 has, for the first time, placed ledger-based records on the same legal footing as qualified electronic signatures in court. That is a structural shift, not a marginal one.
The regulatory framework around Digital Product Passports is consolidating just as quickly. ESPR, in force since July 2024, gives the Commission the mandate to require passports product category by product category, with the first working plan prioritising sectors from textiles to iron and steel and passport requirements phasing in from 2027. Battery passports become mandatory in February 2027 under the Battery Regulation. And EUDR, after two postponements, now applies from 30 December 2026 for large and medium operators, with the Commission confirming in May that there will be no further delay. Anyone placing coffee, cocoa, soy or palm oil on the EU market will need verifiable, geolocated due diligence data within months and the same architecture of attested farm-gate events is what produces it.
Taken together, that is the window. The infrastructure choices producers and member states make in the next year determine whether this wave of regulation lands as a cost they absorb or a rail they build on. Once those choices harden, they will be expensive to unwind.
Build
My message from the conference stage was straightforward: stop waiting for conditions to be perfect. The food system is broken now, the tools to fix it exist now, and we are proving that technology can positively impact the value chain, from farm gate to checkout.
If you work in agri-food, supply chain or public-sector digital identity and you are facing a real deployment challenge, come and talk to us. CommonSource is live, the economics work and the regulatory window is open.