How does IOTA transform global trade into on-chain economic infrastructure

Source: CryptoNewsNet Original Title: How the Iota trade network is turning global trade into onchain economic infrastructure Original Link: https://cryptonews.net/news/altcoins/32320698/

From Speculation Cycle to Real-World Applications

Blockchain remains one of the most challenging markets. Typical startup obstacles such as fundraising, product-market fit, and talent are exacerbated by intense boom-bust cycles, misaligned incentives, and speculative fervor that often end in value destruction.

Over the past decade, the industry has witnessed numerous failed tokens, fallen heroes, and scams that caused devastating losses for retail investors. These failures have resulted in billions of dollars in losses and severely damaged the reputation of the entire crypto industry.

For builders focused on long-term value, this background demands resilience and conviction. Ideals repeatedly clash with market excesses and irrational behavior. But those who persevere do so because they believe this technology can still change society.

Despite the chaos, some founders have been working full-time in this market for nearly 15 years. They argue that no other tech ecosystem offers a comparable opportunity to reshape global economic and value flows.

The core argument is simple: cryptocurrencies and blockchain are already changing the world, and adoption will accelerate. Like cloud computing and AI, distributed ledgers are becoming foundational technologies. Alongside a global community of innovators, blockchain is helping build a world without central gatekeepers, where individuals control their digital sovereignty and can join a borderless digital economy.

This belief led to the launch of IOTA ten years ago, with a clear mission: to bring the real world on-chain. Although this journey has been tumultuous, the project has moved beyond pure speculation into real deployment, and IOTA now supports production-grade use cases.

IOTA as the Backbone of Digital Trade

By the end of 2025, IOTA and its partners launched the African Digital Access and Trade Public Infrastructure Program (ADAPT). Supported by the African Union Free Trade Area Secretariat, World Economic Forum, and Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, it aims to build digital backbone for African trade by connecting identity, data, and finance across the continent.

ADAPT builds on early efforts like the East African Trade Logistics Information Pipeline (TLIP), which reduced border clearance times from weeks to days. Its successor, the Global Trade Information Network (TWIN), runs on IOTA and has expanded globally, digitizing millions of documents and securing physical goods flows on the IOTA mainnet.

IOTA also collaborates with Salus to bring transparency to critical mineral supply chains, helping address a global trade finance gap of trillions of dollars. Additionally, the RESULD program (Responsible Supply Chain and Logistics Due Diligence) is digitizing end-to-end fruit and vegetable supply chains between Kenya, the Netherlands, and the UK.

Meanwhile, IOTA has expanded its influence through integrations with core Web3 infrastructure providers such as BitGo, Uphold, LayerZero, Stargate, and Turnkey. These connections make it easier for global institutional users and developers to access the network.

The next phase is clear: the world is moving on-chain, and IOTA aims to become the largest and most trusted public digital infrastructure for the global economy. With one of the most experienced teams in the field, advanced tech stack, and a strong partner ecosystem, the project is now outlining its roadmap for 2026 and beyond.

The World Will Go On-Chain Within a Decade

IOTA’s vision is that within ten years, approximately $115 trillion of the global economy will largely operate on-chain. This shift will transcend the limitations of the simulated world, unlocking new ways for people to connect, work, and co-create value.

According to this view, humanity’s path to prosperity depends on making AI and blockchain universally accessible. AI provides intelligence, automation, and creativity, while blockchain offers digital trust, authenticity, and auditability in every interaction. Together, they serve as the brain and nervous system of the digital world.

Trust remains the foundation of economic activity. But to grow the global economy, trust must be programmable, neutral, and censorship-resistant. We need programmable data validation, instant peer-to-peer payments without intermediaries, and secure computation of immutable applications at internet speed. Only decentralized ledgers can fully replace error-prone centralized intermediaries with a single source of truth.

From a technical perspective, blockchain is seen as a natural successor to cloud and AI. Cloud enables real-time storage and transmission of data worldwide. The AI race is heading toward superintelligence, creating a universal intelligence layer, boosting productivity, and unlocking new services for billions.

Today, governments and enterprises spend over $723 billion annually on cloud computing, with growth rates expected to exceed 20% per year. A major cloud provider’s annual revenue run rate has reached $120 billion. Meanwhile, the AI market is projected to reach $900 billion in annual expenditure by 2026.

The valuation of the five most valuable private AI startups is expected to reach nearly $1.2 trillion by the end of 2025. These figures illustrate how infrastructure, once adopted globally, can concentrate value.

Although blockchain is younger, it is following a similar trajectory. By 2030, annual expenditure on blockchain networks is expected to reach $393 billion, covering digital payments, transaction systems, digital identity, asset tokenization, and more. However, this growth will be dispersed rather than dominated by a few winners.

The global economy is too large and diverse to be dominated by a single ledger. Many general-purpose networks without clear purpose or strong adoption will fade away, while a few specialized blockchains may anchor different economic sectors, much like cloud platforms, cloud service providers, or leading large language models.

The greatest potential lies in becoming the primary network bringing the real economy on-chain. This is the role IOTA intends to fill, focusing on international trade and logistics.

Choosing a Niche Market: International Trade

IOTA is not pursuing broad speculative adoption but prioritizes product-market fit within a specific vertical: global trade. The project focuses on solving real problems and building defensible moats through deep vertical integration.

In 2025, international goods and services trade exceeds $35 trillion, about one-third of global GDP. Despite its size and systemic importance, trade infrastructure still struggles with outdated systems, isolated data, and heavy reliance on paper.

The pain points are obvious. On any given day, around 4 billion trade documents circulate worldwide. A single shipment can involve up to 30 parties, about 36 documents, and roughly 240 copies of these documents exchanged among participants.

Additionally, administrative costs for cross-border trade can reach 20% of transaction value. Costs include manual document processing, redundant procedures, delays caused by human errors, and missing information. Notably, a major logistics company founded in 1969 primarily moved paper documents across borders for customs and trade.

Banks and traders lose $2-5 billion annually due to forged or duplicated documents (such as invoices and bills of lading). These paper-based weak links also facilitate money laundering and counterfeit goods in trade financing worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Furthermore, trade finance faces an annual funding gap of about $2.5 trillion. Payment terms can extend up to 90 days after goods arrive, making traders reliant on short-term financing. Many reputable companies pay exorbitant interest or cannot access financing at all.

Given these inefficiencies and complex cross-jurisdictional coordination issues, by 2026, trade should no longer rely on cross-border envelopes of paper for customs clearance or financing. Yet, for many routes, this remains the norm.

Legal frameworks have evolved. Since 2017, the Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR) has allowed many jurisdictions to recognize electronic transferable records (including digital bills of lading and warehouse receipts) as fully equivalent to their paper counterparts.

But remaining barriers are less about regulation and more about acceptance and integration. No single company or government can impose global standards. Previous centralized platforms struggled to reach critical mass because participants were reluctant to join infrastructure controlled by competitors.

The only viable solution is to provide neutral, open infrastructure with clear economic benefits—eliminating complexity and costs rather than imposing fees and control. To gain trust at scale, such systems must be nonprofit, open-source, and governed by independent participants, rather than closed, profit-driven platforms.

So far, global trade remains largely unaffected by blockchain adoption. That’s why IOTA sees this as a true blue ocean: an essentially uncontested market with enormous upside potential for the first network to provide neutral infrastructure.

IOTA’s Blue Ocean Strategy in Trade

At a high level, IOTA seeks to build global infrastructure where trillions of real assets are tokenized, exchanged, and settled. A key step toward this vision is establishing IOTA as the blockchain backbone for global trade.

Under this strategy, digitization of trade, asset tokenization, data sharing, certification, and other high-value activities happen on-chain, with IOTA deeply integrated into government and enterprise systems. Once this foundation proves scalable, it can extend to adjacent sectors.

This is IOTA’s blue ocean strategy. It’s not competing for transaction volume within existing DeFi niches but creating a new market segment with limited competition in trade infrastructure.

The potential upside is significant. Digitizing just 5% of global trade efficiency could unlock trillions of dollars in value. The demand for solutions that reduce paperwork and unlock financing is already immense.

The World Economic Forum reports that IOTA’s trade technology and TWIN program could reduce global trade costs by 25%, creating new economic opportunities in both developed and emerging markets. Such impacts would directly boost global GDP.

Since 2018, the IOTA Foundation has invested heavily in global trade and supply chains. As TWIN gains traction in Africa and Europe, the project is fully committed to making IOTA the default ledger for trade flows.

So far, IOTA faces little meaningful competition in this niche. The most notable previous attempts include blockchain platforms from a major tech company and a large shipping firm. However, these platforms used permissioned, top-down models, plagued by conflicts of interest and misaligned incentives.

Many logistics participants are reluctant to adopt infrastructure controlled by direct competitors. Despite investing hundreds of millions of dollars, these platforms were discontinued due to lack of commercial viability. In contrast, IOTA’s neutral, nonprofit approach aims to avoid these structural issues.

TWIN as Proof of Real-Time Adoption

Real-world adoption of trade tech on IOTA began in Kenya. In 2019, the TradeLog pipeline collaborated with TradeMark Africa and the Kenyan government to develop a single-window customs platform integrated with IOTA for a pilot in the flower export sector.

This pilot covered the export of about 7 million flower stems daily. It demonstrated clear efficiency gains by enabling digital verification and data sharing between authorities and exporters. These results paved the way for production-ready systems.

The result is TWIN, the Global Trade Information Network, which has become IOTA’s flagship application for trade modernization. Built directly on the IOTA mainnet, TWIN replaces fragmented, paper-based workflows with shared, verifiable digital infrastructure.

TWIN allows governments, enterprises, and logistics providers to issue verifiable credentials, track shipments as tokenized NFTs, and exchange data across borders in real time. Transactions are executed at near-zero cost with full auditability, transforming physical documents and goods into on-chain assets.

Today, TWIN operates in Kenya’s trade system, initially focusing on flower traders. By the end of Q1, plans are to roll out across all commodities. This means Kenyan exporters will have end-to-end digital trade documents anchored on the IOTA ledger.

In the UK, the Cabinet Office’s Border Strategy team has piloted TWIN to streamline UK-EU freight. Between 2024 and 2025, over 2,000 poultry shipments from Poland to the UK will be tracked on IOTA, providing earlier access to accurate data and smoother border operations.

Four employees from the UK Cabinet Office have been dispatched to work directly with IOTA to expand these pilots. Plans are underway to include additional EU countries and broader freight corridors, strengthening Europe’s footprint.

Since early 2026, TWIN has been fully integrated with the IOTA mainnet. The first clients digitizing freight on TWIN are now operating entirely on the mainnet, with transaction volumes expected to grow throughout 2026 as Kenya, Ghana, the UK, and other partners expand usage.

ADAPT marks the largest adoption milestone so far and a turning point from regional pilots to continental deployment. Led by the African Union Free Trade Area Secretariat in partnership with IOTA, Tony Blair Institute, and World Economic Forum, ADAPT is designed as a unified trade digital public infrastructure for Africa.

The plan aims to connect all African countries and 1.5 billion people by 2035, creating shared trusted sources for identity, data, and finance. It could double intra-Africa trade and unlock over $70 billion in new annual trade value.

By integrating IOTA’s decentralized ledger as the backbone, ADAPT replaces paper-based processes with a trusted digital architecture. Its goal is to reduce border clearance times from 14 days to just a few hours and cut cross-border payment costs by over 50%.

Global momentum is building. Over the next 12 months, IOTA expects to initiate pilots with at least five countries across Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, and North America. By 2030, the target is to deploy TWIN in more than 30 countries.

Each new country adds network effects, making the platform more valuable for existing users and more attractive to new ones. As millions of shipments move across thousands of routes, TWIN is positioned as the digital nervous system for trade operations.

In this model, IOTA connects national single windows, port community systems, logistics platforms, and financial institutions in a trust-minimized, neutral manner. It’s often compared to a global payment system in banking, but here, the network processes data and value across the global supply chain.

Over time, IOTA could become part of the trade infrastructure, much like the internet and GPS underpin today’s logistics. Countries will connect their systems to this global trade network just as they connect to the internet—avoiding economic isolation risks.

Beyond Documents: Tokenization