IOTA (IOTA)

The headline of an old public chain's comeback—over the past few years I've seen it reach at most eighty or ninety percent, never a full hundred. It's usually just the community releasing a roadmap, posting a partnership poster, getting hype for three days and then falling silent. I'm very familiar with this pattern, so when I opened the one‑year summary of TWIN these past couple of days, I didn't have high expectations.

But! This summary contains no roadmap. It lists real countries, real ports, real cargo. The African line TLIP processed over 180,000 commercial invoices and more than 300,000 declarations; the UK border piloted over 2,000 batches of frozen poultry shipped from Poland, with data able to reach regulators up to twenty hours earlier; export documents from Kenya to the UK that used to take eight hours by air or three weeks by sea can now be obtained within five minutes. The UK government also deployed four cabinet office staff to work full‑time on the project for a whole year.

Moreover, its ambition goes beyond that. At the end of last year, @iota partnered with the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat, the World Economic Forum, and the Tony Blair Institute to launch a program called ADAPT, built directly on TWIN. The goal is to connect all 55 African countries into a single open digital trade infrastructure by 2035, doubling intra‑African trade and unlocking over $70 billion in additional trade volume. In May this year, the first steps were taken, with Kenya, Morocco, and Nigeria becoming the first three countries to implement the solution, covering East, North, and West Africa respectively. This is no longer a single project pilot—it’s a continent in motion.

I stared at those numbers for a long time because this is not a speculation about how blockchain might change trade in the future; it's a record of changes already happening. A single cross‑border transaction can involve thirty stakeholders, thirty‑six documents, and over two hundred paper copies. This mess is not a trivial Web3 issue; it's a mountain of waste that global trade has accumulated over decades without being cleared. What IOTA is doing now is turning the blockchain into the layer of trust and audit within trade, rather than launching another on‑chain application that is forgotten after a hundred days.

TWIN has been live for only a year, yet it has already moved from a concept to a real pilot spanning Africa and the UK. While this pace might not seem fast in the Web3 world, when you place it in the context of global trade you realize how difficult it is! It requires negotiating with each government, customs authority, port, and exporter, turning processes that no one is willing to relinquish control over into a network that everyone can use and that no single party dominates. Pushing this to implementation within a year already says a lot.

In a bull market, everyone competes over who tells the most polished story; in a bear market, you can see clearly who is quietly getting things done. Too many projects on the market talk about a story they can't even explain where it will be implemented, whereas over the past ten years @iota seems to have slowly turned that story into flowers in East Africa, poultry in Poland, and the $400 per month saved by a Kenyan exporter.

Train at Home is being used around the globe.

At the moment, there are participants in 16 countries across three continents.

All are contributing to distributed training. https://t.co/euD0nmJRsE

Professional matters should be handled by professionals.

Some people are suited for technology, others for operations; forcing someone who only knows tech to lead a project will only result in chaos.

In this regard, the ten‑year‑old public blockchain IOTA has done a great job.

Jens Munch Lund‑Nielsen, head of the Global Trade and Supply Chain department at the IOTA Foundation and a core driver of the IOTA TWIN project, previously served as Digital Trade Lead at Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company.

No wonder the IOTA TWIN project has taken off; over the past year it has achieved the following major milestones ⬇️

- In May 2025, the TWIN Foundation was officially established, jointly initiated by the IOTA Foundation, TradeMark Africa, the Tony Blair Institute, the World Economic Forum and others, positioned as a neutral global public digital infrastructure for trade.

- Significant progress in Africa: operational‑level deployment in scenarios such as Kenyan flower exports, and collaboration with AfCFTA to advance the ADAPT program, promoting digitalization of intra‑African trade.

- Breakthrough in the UK border pilot: trade data can be delivered to regulators up to 20 hours earlier, and together with Teesside University and the UK government, the digital trade testing platform at Teesside Port has been launched.

- European trade corridor validation: completed pilot verification of over 2,000 batches of poultry trade from Poland to the UK, accumulating real cross‑border data.

If major project teams understood the principle of assigning the right people to the right roles—eliminating CX doing CX and letting tech experts focus on technology—it wouldn't be this bleak now.