Introduction

Odal Node is infrastructure for creating, signing, and serving EU Digital Product Passports (DPPs) under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). It lets a manufacturer produce passports that anyone can verify — without handing their production data to a third party.

The promise runs deeper than a signature. Every passport’s history — publication, amendments, transfer of responsibility, end of life — lives on a tamper-evident, hash-chained audit trail, and the whole story exports as a signed evidence dossier that an auditor can verify completely offline.

Who it’s for

• Manufacturers and operators facing an ESPR deadline who need to issue compliant passports and keep control of their data.
• Developers who want to self-host the standard, on their own infrastructure, with no licence keys and no capability caps.
• Authorities, recyclers, and customers who need to verify a passport is genuine — which they can do against the manufacturer’s public identity, with Odal nowhere in the loop.

How it’s organised

Odal Node is two parts:

Part	What it is
dpp-core	The regulatory standard — the rules a compliant passport must satisfy.
dpp-engine	The service that runs those rules in production.

The core is the rulebook. The engine is the service that uses the rulebook.

The split is deliberate, and it is the subject of Core Concepts: the standard stays open and free, while the operational layer around it is what sustains the project. The two parts ship under different licences, and Licensing is where those terms are set out.

Next steps

• Quick Start — run a node and produce your first signed passport.
• Core Concepts — the three ideas behind everything here.
• Self-Hosting — run the engine on your own infrastructure.