A passport for the sweater in your closet
When a customer walks a used jacket back into a Fnac Darty store in 2026, the European Union will expect that garment to carry something most clothes have never had: a verifiable digital identity. Keyban, a Paris-based startup founded in 2022, is one of the companies trying to make sure that identity actually exists, and that it travels with the product from factory to first sale to resale to recycling. Its bet is that the Digital Product Passport, a regulatory requirement bearing down on European retail, will be easier to ship as an API call than as an internal blockchain project.
Keyban describes itself as "the tokenization layer that lets you embed wallets, digital product passports, and on-chain loyalty, no blockchain expertise needed" [Keyban docs]. In practice, that means a React SDK and JavaScript SDK that retailers' engineering teams can drop into existing storefronts and apps to mint product tokens, run loyalty mechanics on chain, and eventually settle stablecoin payments [Keyban docs]. The company is interoperable across multiple chains rather than tied to one [Keyban docs], a design choice that matters for enterprise buyers who do not want to bet a compliance workflow on a single network.
The bet
The wedge is the Digital Product Passport, or DPP. The most concrete proof point is a partnership with Weavenn, the joint venture between Fnac Darty and CEVA Logistics, to build a Tokenized Product Passport platform that combines logistics, marketplace, and blockchain layers, with a launch planned for the third quarter of 2025 [Supply Chain Magazine, 2025] [Ecommerce Mag]. The use case Keyban points to is the activation of second-hand sales using tokens [IMT Starter], which is exactly the workflow European retailers need to industrialize as the EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation phases in DPP requirements across categories including textiles, electronics, and batteries.
That positioning matters because it reframes blockchain in retail away from speculative collectibles and toward a compliance-and-resale spine. On-chain loyalty is the second leg: Keyban's documentation describes programs where actions from a product review to a resale can trigger a reward "recorded immutably on-chain" [Keyban docs]. Stablecoin payments are the third, advertised on the company's homepage [Keyban] though less visible in the cited customer work to date.
Why it could be big
The tailwind here is regulatory rather than speculative, which is unusual for a Web3 company and arguably more durable. European retailers selling into the bloc will need a passport mechanism for a widening list of product categories over the second half of this decade. The companies that get embedded into the first wave of compliant deployments, particularly through partners like Weavenn that already sit between brands and logistics, have a credible shot at becoming default infrastructure rather than a vendor evaluated in every RFP.
The Weavenn relationship is the clearest signal of that thesis in motion. Fnac Darty is one of the largest consumer electronics and cultural-goods retailers in France, and CEVA Logistics is a global third-party logistics operator owned by CMA CGM. A passport platform that ships through their joint venture is not a pilot in search of a customer; it is a distribution channel into enterprise retail.
The team
Keyban was founded by a group of six co-founders. Charles Kremer is CEO and founder [Les Samouraïs du Business Podcast], with prior engineering roles at Eniblock, IRT SystemX, and Thales Avionics [RocketReach]. Nenad Cetkovic is COO and co-founder [Prospeo] and was previously COO of Lengow, the French e-commerce feed management company that raised a 10 million euro Series B in 2015 [TechCrunch, 2015]. Kei Brousmiche is CTO [LinkedIn], holds a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, and has worked in blockchain since 2016 [LinkedIn]. Sébastien Dolard is Chief Product Officer and Maxime Vanmeerbeck is Software Lead [LinkedIn]. The company raised a pre-seed round of 500,000 euros, with a further pre-seed event reported in March 2026 at undisclosed terms [AccessNewswire, 2026].
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-Seed | 2022-2024 | €500,000 | Undisclosed |
| Pre-Seed | March 2026 | Undisclosed | Undisclosed [AccessNewswire, 2026] |
What the bears say, what the bulls answer
The most credible concern is competitive. Tokenized product passports are a category that several European blockchain infrastructure players, traditional traceability vendors, and large IT integrators are all chasing, and enterprise retail procurement cycles are long. A 500,000 euro pre-seed is a thin balance sheet against incumbents who can absorb a multi-year sales motion. The bull answer, supported by the cited evidence, is that Keyban does not need to win a head-to-head bake-off against an integrator; it needs to be the embedded tokenization layer inside a partner like Weavenn that already owns the customer relationship with Fnac Darty and CEVA's logistics network [Supply Chain Magazine, 2025]. If the Q3 2025 launch ships and the second-hand workflow runs at meaningful volume, the reference is durable.
What to watch
The near-term milestone is whether the Weavenn TPP platform ships on its stated Q3 2025 timeline and what categories it covers at launch [Supply Chain Magazine, 2025]. The medium-term question is whether Keyban converts that reference into a second named retail deployment in 2026, ideally outside France, as DPP enforcement dates harden across the EU. A priced seed round, larger than the 500,000 euro pre-seed already on file, would be the financing signal that the commercial pipeline is real. For a company selling compliance infrastructure into European retail, the most important number over the next twelve months is not raised capital but the count of SKUs actually carrying a Keyban-issued passport.
Pulse Raman covers the regulated edges of consumer technology. Standard of care for product traceability in European retail today remains a patchwork of GS1 barcodes, brand-run serialization databases, and PDF certificates of authenticity, none of which were designed to follow a product into its second or third owner.