IOTA’s trade infrastructure push is moving from concept to live pilots, with the TWIN network now supporting digital trade initiatives across Africa, the United Kingdom, continental Europe and early-stage discussions in Asia. One year after launch, TWIN is being positioned as a distributed-ledger-based infrastructure layer for verifiable identity, trade documentation and supply chain data exchange, with its backers emphasizing practical deployment in ports, invoices, border systems and trade finance rather than speculative crypto use cases.
IOTA TWIN Expands Trade Pilots Worldwide
TWIN, described by its creators as a trusted trade network powered by distributed ledger technology, launched in May 2025 with the aim of connecting participants across global supply chains. The project frames its core problem around the continued reliance on paper in international trade, where a single cross-border transaction can involve as many as 30 stakeholders, 36 documents and up to 240 paper copies. “Every day, goods move across borders. Ships sail, trucks roll, planes take off. But behind the scenes, trade is still running on paper,” TWIN stated in its first-year update.
The most developed deployment is in Africa, where TWIN technology underpins TLIP, the East African trade logistics platform developed with TradeMark Africa. TLIP is preparing for a full public launch later this year and has already processed more than 184,000 commercial invoices, received 328,000 declarations and issued over 2,000 export certificates. Flower exporters including Maasai Flowers, Equator Flowers and AgriFlora are among the platform’s key users, making the pilot a concrete example of blockchain-adjacent infrastructure being used in export-heavy sectors rather than remaining limited to proof-of-concept environments.
TWIN also powers Salus, a trade finance platform focused on critical minerals in Rwanda, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In that setting, TWIN supplies the identity layer, allowing supply chain participants such as miners, transporters and funders to be uniquely identified and verified without relying on a central authority. The network is also the technological foundation informing ADAPT, the Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade initiative led by the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat with the World Economic Forum, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and the IOTA Foundation, which aims to connect all African nations and 1.5 billion people through a single digital trade infrastructure by 2035.
Ports, Invoices and Supply Chains Go Digital
In the United Kingdom, TWIN has been integrated into the Teesside Digital Trade Testbed, where it is set to connect with technologies including autonomous vehicles and geo-locating devices across real-world port and airport infrastructure. The network is also scheduled to go live later this year across several major UK port systems, collectively covering the majority of UK maritime trade and food imports. “In the UK, momentum is accelerating. TWIN is integrated into the Teesside Digital Trade Testbed, which will connect TWIN with solutions like autonomous vehicles and geo-locating devices, and real-world deployment at Teesside’s seaport and airport,” the project said.
The first-year update also highlighted results from Kenya-UK export pilots involving TLIP, where trade documents that previously took eight hours for air freight or three weeks for sea freight to become available were made accessible in under five minutes. The same data was visible to UK border officials three weeks before goods arrived. In separate UK government Border Trade Demonstrators involving the UK Cabinet Office, Suffolk Coastal Port Health Authority and the Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade, TWIN was trialed for documentation covering around 2,000 consignments of chilled poultry from Poland, delivering supply chain data to border authorities up to 20 hours earlier than before.
In continental Europe, TWIN technology is involved in the Virtual Watch Tower, a global network of supply chain monitoring hubs; RESULD, which digitizes plant-based product trade from Kenya to the Port of Rotterdam; and MISSION, an EU Horizon-funded project focused on optimizing maritime traffic to reduce port congestion and fuel consumption. The project has also opened conversations with governments across Asia for future pilots around digital verification infrastructure. “The goal is a world where every participant in global trade, large or small, in Nairobi or Newcastle, has access to the same trusted digital infrastructure, and where the paperwork never slows down the movement of goods,” TWIN stated.
TWIN’s stated target is adoption in more than 30 countries by 2030, linking national trade systems, port authorities, logistics platforms and financial institutions into an interoperable digital network. For IOTA, the progress places distributed ledger infrastructure inside one of the more operationally complex areas of global commerce: trade documentation, identity verification and cross-border data exchange. The scale of future adoption will depend on government integrations, port-system rollouts and whether pilots can move into durable production use across multiple jurisdictions.
AI Transparency Note: This article was prepared with the assistance of an AI system based on the sources listed and was reviewed, edited, and approved by a human editor before publication. All quotes, data points, and factual claims are intended to be grounded in the cited source material; however, errors cannot be ruled out entirely.