United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTP)

GoSource led the design of the United Nations Transparency Protocol, creating an open and interoperable architecture for trusted digital supply chain transparency at global scale.

Challenge

As much as 70% of product sustainability claims have been found to be fake or misleading. Regulators have noticed, and the EU in particular now demands verifiable evidence behind claims, at both corporate and product level.

For an exporter that is a barrier to market access. For an importer it is compliance and reputational exposure. Everyone agrees supply chain traceability is the answer.

The trouble is that traceability keeps failing. Almost every attempt asks many actors to contribute data into one central platform, and global supply chains are full of parties who compete with each other, operate under different laws, and have no reason to trust whoever runs the platform. Those efforts reach pilot scale and stop.

Solution

GoSource contributed Steve Capell to lead the UN project set up to solve it. Around 80 experts from roughly 20 countries worked on it under the UN’s Open Development Process, which means the result belongs to everybody.

Scale was answered by refusing the central platform. Each actor keeps their own data and issues a Digital Product Passport for each product they ship, discoverable from the product identifier. Trace a supply chain by following links from one passport to the next. Every passport is readable by both people and machines, because a supply chain contains both sophisticated systems and someone with a phone.

Trust was answered with W3C Verifiable Credentials for tamper-proofing, third-party sustainability certificates linked to the passports as evidence, and strong identity credentials so a passport cannot simply be forged. Together those give a trust architecture that works without anyone owning the middle.

Outcomes

UNTP is published: a complete set of open specifications and conformance criteria that anyone can implement independently.

It holds an interoperable core that any industry or any nation can extend without breaking interoperability with everyone else, which is the property that usually gets lost first.

It is already running in agriculture, for Australian trade into the EU, and in critical minerals, covering Canadian material used by Chinese battery manufacturers selling into Europe. The European Commission expects UNTP to address the upstream data problem its own industry faces under due diligence obligations. A UN policy document, UNECE Recommendation 49, now guides nations implementing it.

Technologies

A decentralised linked-data architecture. W3C Verifiable Credentials. Digital Product Passports, human and machine readable. Resolvable identifiers for end-to-end traceability. Digital identity credentials against counterfeiting. Open specifications with conformance criteria, developed through the UN Open Development Process.

Why it was given to the UN

An anti-counterfeiting protocol is patentable. We gave it away instead.

GoSource exists to build things that materially improve how people and the environment fare, and that choice regularly costs more profitable work. Under UN governance the intellectual property belongs to the global community, which is the only arrangement where a protocol designed to leave unsustainable behaviour nowhere to hide can actually be trusted by the people it constrains.