IOTA (IOTA)

The crypto market has entered a deep bear phase, but good projects are still forging ahead.

I spent a week in New York, talking with many project teams; generally, they remain confident about the market. Strangely, this is completely different from what is shown on social media.

As far as I know, projects that truly get things done have amassed a pile of positive catalysts waiting to be gradually released.

Let's dive in!

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Crypto information is now truly fragmented; markets driven by price and hype are gradually shrinking. Without the backdrop of a massive bubble wealth effect, attention naturally shifts to more profitable avenues, making AI, stocks, and even the watch market the new favorites of crypto refugees.
On the other hand, projects using blockchain technology to transform the global financial and trade systems are making advances, growing wildly in unseen places. This morning I received a push from Hermers tg bot: TWIN has turned one year old.

Old friends know I've been tracking the long‑standing @IOTA project; TWIN is the practical implementation of IOTA's ecosystem vision, short for Trade Worldwide Information Network. Just as VISA/Mastercard built a financial clearing system, TWIN is an entire neutral digital infrastructure for global trade, allowing all trade participants to exchange data, documents, and assets within the same trusted network. Not many trade software solutions exist, so what's special about TWIN? This is a real blockchain use case: TWIN fills the gap of a decentralized trusted network, removing reliance on a single entity and putting trust into a code‑neutral model.

Since its launch in May last year, TWIN has already completed pilot projects such as Kenya‑UK export, UK border, and Africa's digital public infrastructure ADAPT. For example, export trade from Kenya to the UK involved a massive amount of paper documents; previously, sea shipping took three weeks and air freight eight hours, but with TWIN it only takes five minutes. Typically, even the simplest cross‑border trade order requires interaction among more than 30 parties, 36 documents, and 240 paper copies. TWIN brings huge improvements in security, trustworthiness, and efficiency.

Jen, head of the Global Trade and Supply Chain department at the IOTA Foundation, was recently interviewed. If you're interested in this, I strongly recommend watching it—Jen is a veteran in trade and very experienced.

Link: https://t.co/xWOzBk0Dv4

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Lately I've been insanely busy; even during a bull market I wasn't this occupied. I've encountered a huge number of projects similar to IOTA, which are also deploying blockchain applications in the bear market. In contrast, many hype projects barely update their Twitter in a bear market, or occasionally chase hype, post memes, or engage in useless partnership talks… just waiting for another chance to grab a profit.

I'm saying this with the simplest mindset: if you still believe in blockchain or the crypto space, ...

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.

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