Programme at a glance

Provenance and settlement infrastructure for battery materials, delivered to the ECB under the Appia programme, with the CRRC EU Battery Passport flow as the first live pilot.

Work packages

Planned roles

27 months

Oct 2026 to Dec 2028

200M/day

Transaction design capacity

Delivery entities

What is being built

Four capabilities, delivered as one platform.

Track, trace, provenance: Asset onboarding, a ten-stage lifecycle metadata schema and a provenance chain that survives audit. This is the foundation everything else sits on.
Passport compliance: Token metadata and lifecycle data mapped to EU Battery Regulation 2023/1542 and Digital Product Passport requirements, aligned to Catena-X and CIRPASS.
Settlement: Programmable delivery-versus-payment with conditional compliance verification, interoperating with TARGET Services over ISO 20022.
Quantum-resistant security: CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium primitives with HSM-backed key management, designed to coexist with Eurosystem cryptographic standards.

Milestone spine

Contractual dates. Amber marks the four points where slippage moves the end date.

31 Aug 2026

Contract suite executed

Mob

1 Oct 2026

Formal mobilisation

31 Dec 2026

Statement of work signed off

31 Mar 2027

Architecture baseline frozen: schema, API, ISO 20022 catalogue, passport schema, cryptographic coexistence, SLA values

30 Jun 2027

Integration scaffold and engine core operational

15 Dec 2027

First end-to-end issuance, compliance gateway live

30 Jun 2028

Interoperability with TARGET Services demonstrated

1 Sep 2028

Security audit closed, documentation final, code freeze

1 Oct 2028

Knowledge transfer complete, test entry

31 Oct 2028

System integration testing complete

30 Nov 2028

User acceptance and CRRC pilot complete

31 Dec 2028

Final test report and go/no-go recommendation

Phasing

Phase	Window	What has to be true at the end
Phase 0	Oct 2026 – Mar 2027	Architecture baseline workshop held and the M1 freeze achieved. Statement of work signed. Hardware security modules ordered against an 8–12 week lead time.
Phase 1	Apr 2027 – Dec 2027	Core build. Engine, contracts and compliance gateway reach first end-to-end issuance at M3.
Phase 2	Jan 2028 – Jun 2028	Integration and automated regression. Interoperability demonstrated at M4.
Phase 3	H1 2028	CRRC pilot data onboarded, or the synthetic fallback dataset substituted.
Phase 4	Jul 2028 – Sep 2028	Hardening. SLA validation and closure of the independent security and cryptographic audit.
Test cycle	Oct 2028 – Dec 2028	System integration testing, user acceptance, pilot cycle, DORA resilience testing, go/no-go.