The EV Battery Track and Trace Pilot (“Pilot”) is spearheaded by MOBI’s Supply Chain Working Group with contributions from Accenture, AIOI, Altaventure, Anritsu, Arxum, ASJade Tech, Aucnet, Autodata Group, AWS, Blockedge, BMW, CEVT, Dana, DENSO, DLT Labs, DMI, Fifth-9, Ford, Hitachi, Honda, Kaula, IBM, IOTA, ITOCHU, Marelli, Mazda, Nara Institute, Nissan, ParkMyFleet, Politecnico Di Torino, Quantstamp, R3, Reply, State Farm, Stellantis, Southeast Toyota Finance, SyncFab, Spring Free EV, Thirdware, Trade Log, TICO, Vinturas and USAA.

As the use of batteries increases in various industries and applications, such as electric vehicles and renewable energy storage, stakeholders must align on a standardized approach to promote quality assurance, safety, and circularity in the global battery value chain. In recent years, landmark regulations in the US, EU, Asia, and other regions across the globe have placed increased emphasis on ensuring information traceability in the battery supply chain. Measures such as the US Treasury’s Section 30D Guidance on EV Tax Credits and EU Battery Regulation mandate the implementation of digital records to track the complete lifecycle of batteries, underscoring the need for a battery passport: a digital credential containing key information about the battery’s composition, state of health, history, and more.

Ensuring compliance with these and other emerging regulations around the globe requires a standardized framework that preserves proprietary information, ensures traceability and accountability, and remains accessible to appropriate stakeholders. Within the global battery value chain, countless public and private stakeholders operate with distinct processes for managing sensitive business and consumer data. Due to this siloed approach, multiparty data exchange between suppliers, battery manufacturers, and producers requires costly one-off integrations. However, in complex battery supply chain networks where trust incurs significant frictional costs, the industry lacks the interoperability and standardized framework for authenticating battery materials, sourcing, recycled content, and performance.

To this end, MOBI and its members have co-developed a decentralized Web3 solution framework rooted in World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) trusted identity standards — one that facilitates seamless, privacy-preserving, globally compliant coordination and data exchange.

This pilot leveraged MOBI’s Web3 infrastructure — Citopia and the Integrated Trust Network (ITN) — to demonstrate its potential use in establishing an interoperable, bidirectional track-and-trace system (Global Battery Passport System) for securely collecting, handling, and sharing battery data across organizational boundaries. The pilot leveraged Citopia Self-Sovereign Digital Twins™ (SSDTs™) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to simulate traceable, privacy-preserving interactions between EV batteries and ecosystem stakeholders such as manufacturers, suppliers, and consumers.

The pilot included a workflow to reliably track and trace assets in the supply chain using Citopia and the ITN, demonstrating the full lifecycle of a VC from issuance, presentation, verification, and revocation. To achieve this, a Battery Birth Certificate (BBC) was issued by the supplier. The BBC (stored in a battery’s SSDT™) contains key information about the battery such as its serial number, energy capacity, chemical composition, and charging & discharging characteristics.

The BBC was linked with the battery components to establish a provable association between the credential and the physical asset. The BBC was then transferred to different stakeholders, creating a series of Verifiable Presentations that can be used to prove the chain of custody.

Later, the battery credential was linked with the Vehicle Birth Certificate (stored in a vehicle’s SSDT™, defined by MOBI VID Standards) when installed by the OEM. When dealing with faulty batteries that were returned to the supplier, RevocationList2020 from W3C’s VC standard was implemented to revoke the vehicle or battery credentials if the components of the vehicle or battery were changed.