IOTA, the distributed ledger technology project, has announced a strategic pivot away from the speculative cryptocurrency sector to focus on digitizing the $35 trillion global trade market. The IOTA Foundation released a manifesto outlining this transition, aiming to replace slow, paper-based international trade processes with a neutral digital layer.
The core of this strategy is the Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN), a production-grade system now live on the IOTA Mainnet. TWIN digitizes documents and secures trade data in real-time, creating a "single source of truth" to combat fraud and inefficiency. The project highlights that up to 20% of a shipment's value is lost to administrative costs, and banks lose $2-5 billion annually to forged documents.
Real-world adoption is already underway. In Kenya, TWIN is tracking approximately seven million flower stems daily, with plans to expand to all Kenyan commodities by the end of March 2026. In the United Kingdom, the Cabinet Office has used the system to track over 2,000 poultry shipments from Poland, with four government employees now working directly with IOTA to expand trials.
The most ambitious initiative is ADAPT (Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade). In partnership with the World Economic Forum, the Tony Blair Institute, and the AfCFTA Secretariat, ADAPT aims to build a continent-wide digital trade infrastructure for 1.5 billion people by 2035. The goal is to reduce cross-border payment costs by over 50% and cut border clearance times from weeks to hours, potentially unlocking $70 billion in new trade value for Africa.
Expansion into Southeast Asia is also progressing, with IOTA in advanced negotiations with several ASEAN countries, leveraging the region's 650 million inhabitants and developed tokenization laws.
The scale of global trade presents a massive potential for network activity. With 2.5 billion cross-border shipments annually, each generating roughly 26 transactions, capturing just 1% of the market would mean over 650 million yearly transactions on the IOTA network. This activity directly feeds into the token's utility and deflationary economics. Transaction fees are burned, reducing supply, while companies must hold IOTA tokens to access network storage and resources. Stakers can currently earn about 11% APY.
IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener and CMO Karen O'Brien emphasized that crypto's success lies in solving real economic problems, not speculation. The project's vision is to make its network as essential as GPS or the SWIFT banking system for global commerce.
