- IOTA wants to expand its TWIN trading infrastructure to around seven countries by the end of the year.
- The focus is on the digitalization of supply chains, trade financing and payments.
IOTA wants to expand its TWIN trading infrastructure to a total of around seven countries this year. Co-founder Dom Schiener said this in a subsequently published statement Videointerview after the World Crypto Forum in South Korea. The focus is on the digitization of cross-border supply chains, trade financing and payments.
Will IOTA become the SWIFT of global trade?
Schiener sees TWIN as the answer to a structural problem in world trade: central processes between companies, ports, customs authorities and financial institutions still run on paper:
“We have been in the market for ten years and have worked in many different industries and use cases. We have found the greatest use of blockchain in cross-border trade because there are clear issues of mutual trust between countries and no standard for digital data solutions. That is why trade and supply chain infrastructure to this day is based on paper documents.”
And Schiener has a great vision. TWIN should not only digitize individual processes, but also establish itself as a global base layer for trade.
“Our focus with TWIN is to become the SWIFT of global trade. We make it possible for countries, companies and financial institutions to actually export in a global context. That is exactly what we see our role as.”
The origin of this strategy lies in a project in Kenya. The IOTA Foundation began digitizing trading infrastructure there around five years ago. The success of this project gave rise to the insight that global trade was the biggest problem area that IOTA could solve with its technology:
“The success of this project made us realize that global trade is the biggest problem we can solve. At the same time, we realized we can’t do it alone. That’s why we brought together diverse partners, including the Tony Blair Institute, the World Economic Forum, Trademark Africa and other major NGOs and trade thought leaders.”
This collaboration resulted in the TWIN Foundation in Geneva, which is currently hosted under the umbrella of the World Economic Forum. According to Schiener, your task is to bring additional governments and institutional partners on board and gradually bring countries onchain.
These countries are in focus
Schiener put the funding gap in the trade finance market at $2.5 trillion. In Africa and the United Kingdom, IOTA is already working to tokenize physical assets such as critical minerals, raw materials and trade receivables and thereby make them financeable. The aim is to provide smaller and medium-sized companies as well as larger companies with better access to financing.
Schiener cited the export process in Kenya as a practical example. Traders would no longer have to print out documents and physically hand them over to authorities, but could automatically submit export declarations and trade documents digitally to customs and ports.
“Instead of customs and ports receiving data in physical form as paper documents, they receive this data in digital form, tokenized on IOTA. So a trader no longer has to print out a paper document and hand it over to customs, but instead submits the export declaration or other trade documents automatically using our technology. This allows customs and ports to release the data immediately, and we can even use AI to fully automate this entire process.”
Schiener is targeting further expansion for 2026. In addition to Kenya and the United Kingdom, five other countries are to be connected via pilot projects:
“We will go country by country and bring the whole world onchain. We will not stop until the whole world is trading digitally through IOTA. This year we will connect five more countries in addition to Kenya and the UK, so by the end of the year we will probably be at around seven countries connected through pilots.”
A particular focus is on South Korea. According to him, IOTA wants to set up a pilot there together with a local industrial company, government support, port authorities and financial institutions, probably for a trade corridor with the United Kingdom or the USA.
In the coming months, stablecoin companies will also be integrated to process cross-border payments via TWIN immediately and with lower fees.
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