As regulatory pressure grows around supply chain transparency, sustainability, and product traceability, The Hashgraph Group is seeking to position itself as an enterprise technology partner rather than a crypto-native platform story. In a written interview with Korea IT Times, Pawel Sobczak, VP of Global Sales and Partnerships, outlined how the company’s TrackTrace platform is designed to help global organizations prepare for the EU’s Digital Product Passport framework while strengthening governance, verifiable data flows, and operational trust across borders.
The interview centers on The Hashgraph Group’s effort to present itself as a provider of practical digital infrastructure for enterprises operating in increasingly complex regulatory and operational environments. Rather than emphasizing Web3 as a standalone narrative, the discussion focuses on how decentralized infrastructure, digital identity, and intelligent automation can be applied to supply chains, sustainability reporting, compliance, and cross-border coordination.
A key focus is TrackTrace, the company’s recently launched platform aimed at supporting compliance with the EU’s Digital Product Passport regulation. The product is presented as a trusted data layer for global supply chains, enabling organizations to build verifiable product records, improve transparency across multiple stakeholders, and prepare earlier for requirements that are expected to reshape how goods entering the European market are documented and monitored.
The interview also highlights Sobzac’s background in enterprise software, digital transformation, large-scale infrastructure, and AI. That experience is used to reinforce The Hashgraph Group’s broader message: enterprise adoption of Web3-related technologies will depend not on theory or market speculation, but on whether they can solve real business problems in ways that fit regulatory demands and existing operational systems.ㅡEd.
Q&A with Pawel Sobczak, VP of Global Sales and Partnerships at the Hashgraph Group
Can you introduce The Hashgraph Group and its focus within the Web3 and enterprise landscape?
The Hashgraph Group is a Swiss Web3 and AI technology company working entirely within the Hedera ecosystem. We bring technology that was once mainly used by crypto insiders into enterprise markets, and we work with CFOs, CEOs, and operations leaders to deploy practical business solutions.
We build enterprise-grade systems that combine decentralized infrastructure with intelligent automation. This allows organizations to manage areas such as supply chains, digital identity, sustainability reporting, and governance with greater transparency and security.
Hedera itself is not a traditional blockchain. It is a next-generation, graph-based distributed ledger that offers high performance, low cost, and strong energy efficiency. While crypto assets drove early interest in this space, our solutions extend across multiple areas, including decentralized identity, sustainability reporting, and workflow automation.
As organizations grow and connect across borders and jurisdictions, managing trust becomes more complex. Our decentralized infrastructure and self-sovereign identity systems operate securely and reliably, even when AI agents or automated systems act on their behalf. These technologies address difficult challenges around verification and governance, giving companies greater confidence to scale globally.
You recently joined The Hashgraph Group. What attracted you to the company at this stage in your career?
After 30 years at IBM, working in software, digital transformation, and large-scale infrastructure, I have seen what makes global systems work and where they struggle. More recently, I worked at a generative AI startup, which reinforced my belief that the next phase of business transformation will come from the convergence of AI and decentralized technologies, particularly decentralized identity.
We are at an inflection point. In the cloud era, what moved was data storage and compute. In the agentic AI era, what moves is agency — the ability to act, transact, and commit on behalf of an organization. That is a fundamentally different kind of power to delegate to a machine, and decentralized trust and identity are critical in this environment.
The Hashgraph Group operates at that intersection, focusing on building Web3 infrastructure that works in business environments and aligns with regulatory and operational realities. Over the past two years, the team has been building projects, pilots, and MVPs while investing heavily in practical business use cases.
That experience has become the foundation for our intellectual property and products such as IDTrust, EcoGuard, TrackTrace, and several others. One of the challenges I have seen throughout my career is the gap between technical capability and business readiness, and the work we are doing helps close that gap.
For me, the opportunity to work on real enterprise systems at the intersection of AI and decentralized technology made joining the company the right step at this stage of my career.
The Hashgraph Group recently launched TrackTrace. What does this solution represent for the company, and how has your background shaped your approach to it?
TrackTrace is a natural next step in our enterprise strategy. It combines decentralized identity, immutable audit trails, and intelligent workflow automation to help companies comply with the EU’s Digital Product Passport regulation.
The idea is to create a trusted data layer for global supply chains. Each product receives a verifiable digital record that follows it across organizations and borders, improving transparency and reducing errors throughout the chain.
Distributed ledger technology plays an important role here because it allows systems to share verified information without repeating checks or exposing unnecessary data. From my experience in this field, I believe companies will not adopt new infrastructure unless it integrates smoothly with the systems they already use and meets regulatory requirements.
That thinking strongly influenced how TrackTrace was designed. We also integrate agentic AI into the workflow, allowing the system to process information, trigger actions, and update records automatically instead of waiting for manual input. That makes operations more efficient and significantly easier to scale.
What is the EU Digital Product Passport (DPP), and why does it matter for businesses now?
The Digital Product Passport is part of the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. It requires products sold in the EU to carry a digital record that includes information such as origin, composition, environmental impact, durability, and lifecycle data.
Even though enforcement begins in 2027, companies cannot wait until the last moment. Businesses exporting into the EU need time to coordinate suppliers, integrate systems, and prepare their operations.
TrackTrace helps companies begin that process now by providing a trusted data layer across the supply chain. It allows organizations to start capturing and verifying the information that will eventually be required.
Starting early offers companies more than regulatory compliance. It also strengthens competitiveness in a market where sustainability and supply chain transparency are becoming increasingly important.
Every manufacturer or distributor operating in Europe will have to comply with EU DPP regulations. There is no time to waste, and companies need to act and prepare now.
Why do you believe The Hashgraph Group is positioned to lead enterprise adoption in a space that many still see as speculative?
The Hashgraph Group is well-positioned to support enterprise adoption for several reasons. Most importantly, it combines expertise in Web3, distributed ledger technology, and AI with a strong understanding of enterprise adoption requirements.
We take infrastructure originally built for Web3 insiders and turn it into solutions that a CFO, COO, or supply chain VP can deploy to solve real business problems. We use Hedera DLT, which is governed by a group of more than 30 leading global organizations, including Fortune 500 companies such as Google, Dell, IBM, FedEx, and Hitachi, as well as innovative Web3 firms and top universities.
This combination of participants also gives companies like The Hashgraph Group a stronger understanding of what enterprise users actually require. As a result, our solutions are built around real-world needs rather than theory alone, and we have been developing ideas into functioning systems that work at scale and in complex environments.
Identity, auditability, and automation are just a few of the areas where decentralized technology can make a meaningful difference. Our products show that there is nothing merely theoretical or speculative about it.
From an enterprise perspective, why use a distributed ledger instead of a traditional database?
Traditional databases work very well when a single organization controls the entire system. The challenge emerges when multiple independent parties need to rely on the same data without one of them acting as the central authority, which is common in global supply chains and cross-organizational processes.
Distributed ledger technology creates a shared reference point that all parties can trust. In the case of TrackTrace, it anchors audit trails in a tamper-resistant manner and improves transparency across the supply chain.
Most enterprises are not replacing their existing systems. Instead, they are adding a layer that strengthens trust, accountability, and interoperability between organizations.
As operations become more complex, with cross-border transactions and AI systems acting on behalf of companies, distributed ledgers can handle the required scale and speed in ways that traditional systems often struggle to match.
How does this most recent product launch reflect The Hashgraph Group’s broader vision?
TrackTrace reflects our goal of building a trusted digital infrastructure for the global economy. We want systems that operate reliably at scale while keeping data secure and private.
Decentralized identity allows people and organizations to trust one another without giving up control over their information. That is especially important in sensitive areas such as health records or high-value assets.
We combine intelligent automation with verifiable data so that infrastructure becomes both practical and scalable. With TrackTrace and future products, decentralized technologies can be deployed in real enterprise settings to create transparency, compliance, and operational efficiency.
In five to ten years, we may look back and wonder why this was not obvious earlier. Adoption, education, and user enablement will be critical, and I see a significant future for systems built on distributed ledger technology and powered by agentic AI. That is exactly what we are building at The Hashgraph Group.
