- IOTA CMO Karen O’Brien describes a restart with Move and a focus on trade and supply chain.
- IOTA wants to put adoption ahead of the token price and relies on ADAPT Africa and raw material use cases.
IOTA is realigning itself after the strategic restructuring and wants to become the base layer for cross-border trade and supply chain processes. Karen O’Brien, CMO of the project since October 2025, said on CoinDesk’s “Generation C” podcast that IOTA thinks less in short-term market cycles – and more in government rollouts and industrial projects, with an eye on Africa and selected commodity use cases.
O’Brien describes IOTA as a project with ten years of crypto experience that is currently reinventing itself technically to open up new product paths.
“IOTA is one of the OG chains – on the market for ten years. And in May 2025 the decision was made to switch to a Move architecture at its core and to reposition itself towards a Layer 1.”
IOTA relies on trading instead of hype
From their point of view, this creates a combination of experience from early cycles and a modern tech stack that should enable new applications. O’Brien justifies the focus not with hype, but with a very concrete problem in the real economy.
“I believe global trade and supply chain on blockchain is one of the greatest opportunities of all. It’s hard to find another $35 trillion industry that still relies so heavily on paper, PDFs and email today. For IOTA, this is a huge field with much that is still unoccupied.”
O’Brien highlighted Move architecture (“Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade”) as the most important signal of real adoption. The initiative aims to build digital trading infrastructure based on IOTA in 55 African countries – as the backbone for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
“We’re developing several significant partnerships – one of which we recently announced in Africa. It’s a partner consortium where we’re building for 55 countries. That’s huge.”
What is important is not just the number of countries, but who is sitting at the table. It’s about high-quality partners who can bring IOTA into regulations, official processes and standards, i.e. exactly where it is decided whether a system will scale.
As another example, O’Brien cited a collaboration with Salus, which tokenizes rare minerals.
“We also have other partners on board, for example Salus, who tokenize rare minerals. This is a hot topic at the moment. What they are building is really interesting – even if it doesn’t necessarily trigger the same hype as crypto topics that directly drive the token in the short term.”
O’Brien made it clear that while token performance remains relevant in the market, it should not be used as a benchmark.
“I’m often asked how we measure success if not through the token price. Of course we’d like to see the token price rise, but I don’t think that’s separate from building something real and sustainable.”
More important are adoption, partner trust and the consistency with which IOTA delivers over time. Finally, O’Brien referred to the recently published IOTA Manifesto by co-founder Dominik Schiener, which is intended as a reference for policy makers, partners and journalists.
IOTA News —
Today’s featured guest is Karen O’Brien (@bondjanebond), CMO of IOTA, on CoinDesk’s Generation C podcast by @CoinDesk.
The thesis is clear: the crypto hype cycle is burning out, and a new phase is emerging where real infrastructure, institutional credibility,… pic.twitter.com/CPGFyOE7CT— Salima (@Salimasbegum) January 28, 2026
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