On 22 September 2025, the CircularTech Forum (CTF2025) brought together a curated lineup of European exhibitors and industry leaders at Komed in Cologne. Xordex Ventures was one of fifteen companies on the show floor β a deliberately small format that prioritized depth of conversation over booth count.
This year's theme β "DPP in Action" β focused on two questions that have been moving from theory to operational reality through 2025:
- How do circular-economy processes integrate with EU Digital Product Passport infrastructure?
- What are the credible models for DPP monetization beyond pure compliance?
Who was in the room
CTF2025 brought together a mix of platform vendors, traceability specialists, standards bodies, and consultancies:
The exhibitor list reads like a map of the European DPP ecosystem: Apkudo, Spherity, Siemens, Xordex Ventures, T-Systems International, TraWeBa, GS1, NOS d.o.o., efa - Effizienz-Agentur NRW, Neoception GmbH, CE-RISE Project, DataSpace Solutions, Narravero, and STARTPLATZ AI Hub.
What stood out: this was not a vendor-vs-vendor competition. The conversations were about interoperability β how each platform plays in a wider supply-chain stack where the brand's PIM, the manufacturer's MES, the recycler's intake system, and the regulator's audit interface all need to read the same passport.
Three takeaways
1. The "DPP-as-cost-center" framing is losing
The industry mood has shifted. A year ago, most conversations around DPP were defensive: how do we comply at minimum cost. CTF2025 was full of brands openly discussing how to monetize the consumer scan β loyalty programs, second-hand market activation, repair-service bookings, and warranty automation tied to the same digital identifier required by ESPR.
This matters because it changes who in the brand owns the project. When DPP was a compliance lift, sustainability and legal led. Now CMOs and Heads of Direct-to-Consumer are showing up to the same RFPs.
2. Standardization is racing the deadlines
The EU Commission and CEN/CENELEC working groups are publishing schema specifics in parallel with the 2026 enforcement curve. Two practical implications surfaced repeatedly:
- Mandatory vs. optional fields must be cleanly separated in your data model from day one β the optional set will expand over the next three years
- Cross-category portability matters more than people expect: brands selling both batteries and electronics will hit two different schemas with overlapping fields, and stitching them later costs more than designing for it now
3. Identifier choice is becoming a board-level decision
Several brand attendees came specifically to compare NFC vs QR vs RFID for their product line. Cost, durability, consumer experience, and clone-resistance trade off differently per category. We've published a separate breakdown of NTAG213 vs NTAG424 DNA for teams making this call.
We discussed how Hashentic deploys NTAG424 DNA for high-value categories (luxury, watches, pharma, batteries) and NTAG213 for lower-value goods (coffee, F&B, apparel basics) β with the same backend handling both. See the full Use Cases page for 14 placement examples.
Why we joined
Xordex Ventures and Hashentic are building digital product infrastructure β not a single-feature compliance tool. That positioning resonates strongest in rooms like CTF where buyers are explicitly thinking about platform consolidation rather than point solutions.
The forum also confirmed our roadmap focus on AI-assisted onboarding for Q2 2026 (covered in our General page AI section). The most common pain point we heard was time-to-first-passport: brands describing 6-month internal projects to ship a single SKU. The faster we can compress that loop, the larger the market opportunity becomes.
Next stop
We're already working on the next CircularTech edition β the Hannover Messe Edition in April 2026 β where the conversation will pivot from DPP basics to Standardization & Market Adoption. If you couldn't make Cologne, that one's worth the trip.
If you're sizing a DPP project for 2026 and want a quick second opinion on chip choice, schema mapping, or deployment timeline, book a 30-minute review with our team.
