- IOTA founder Dominik Schiener is changing the strategic direction of IOTA, with a focus on the $35 trillion global trade.
- His focus is on digital identity, tokenization, the TWIN platform project and onchain infrastructure. His goal: to establish IOTA as a neutral network for global trade.
IOTA founder Schiener diagnoses a structural crisis in global trade: It forms the backbone of the global economy, but its infrastructure is paradoxically in a state that is more reminiscent of the 20th century than of the digital age. Despite an annual volume of over $35 trillion, supply chains, banks, logistics service providers and government agencies continue to rely on paper-based documents, manual review processes and siled IT systems.
This fragmentation leads to enormous frictional losses. Border clearance often takes weeks because documents are physically transported, copied multiple times and checked by different authorities. The lack of transparency creates distrust between trading partners, which in turn leads to excessive collateral, high financing costs and a global trade finance deficit of several trillion dollars.
You give the IOTA-Manifest describes this situation as a systemic weakness that not only inhibits efficiency, but also endangers the resilience of global supply chains. In a world increasingly characterized by geopolitical tensions, climate change and economic shocks, this aging infrastructure is becoming a strategic risk.
IOTA as a trustworthy digital trading structure
Against this background, the manifesto presents IOTA as a neutral, open and scalable infrastructure that aims to lead global trade into a digital, interoperable and forgery-proof future. The authors emphasize that IOTA should not be understood as another crypto project competing for attention in the speculative market.
Instead, IOTA positions itself as a technological base layer that maps identities, documents, goods and financial flows onchain, thereby creating a common, immutable source of truth. This architecture is intended to structurally solve the central problems of world trade – lack of transparency, inefficient processes, lack of interoperability.
The manifesto points to specific applications that are already in use: The TWIN framework enables the digital mapping of trade documents on the IOTA mainnet, while projects in the African Free Trade Area and the United Kingdom show how regulatory processes, customs clearance and supply chain management can be accelerated through onchain technology.
IOTA acts as a neutral intermediary between companies, governments and financial institutions without exercising control over data or processes. This neutrality is highlighted as a key advantage as it creates trust and forms the basis for a global, interoperable infrastructure.
Vision of an onchain global economy
In the final part, the manifesto creates an ambitious vision of the future that goes far beyond technological optimization. It describes a global economy in which all trade processes – from identity verification and documentation to financing and customs clearance – are digitally, transparently and immutably mapped onchain. This scenario creates a global network that is not only more efficient, but also fairer and more resilient.
Schiener argues that even a small proportion of the over two billion cross-border shipments annually would generate enormous onchain activity, which in turn would structurally anchor demand for the IOTA token. In this vision, the token is not viewed as a speculative asset, but rather as a functional component of a global infrastructure that reflects real economic processes.
The manifesto sets out the goal of bringing a significant proportion of global trade onchain within a decade, ushering in a new era in which efficiency, transparency and trust are no longer hindered by outdated systems. This vision is deliberately big, but it is underpinned by real pilot projects, institutional partnerships and a clear strategic direction.
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