IOTA’s Blockchain Trade Network Aims to Slash Costs—Banks Grumble

IOTA teams up with global partners to launch a blockchain-powered trade platform, promising to streamline cross-border commerce. The initiative targets the trillion-dollar inefficiencies in legacy systems—finally giving SWIFT some sleepless nights.

How it works: The distributed ledger cuts out middlemen, automates customs, and settles transactions in minutes. Early pilots show a 70% reduction in paperwork costs—take that, bureaucratic red tape.

The catch? Traditional finance players are already lobbying against it. Because who wouldn’t fight to preserve those juicy 3% transaction fees?

Real-world deployments

TWIN is already powering real-world deployments worldwide. Examples include: 1) the United Kingdom’s Cabinet Office pilot for poultry imports from the European Union, 2) a blockchain-enabled monitoring hub known as the VIRTUAL Watch Tower, and 3) fresh produce tracking between Kenya and the Netherlands via the RESULD project. These implementations showcase how digital transparency can reduce disruptions, ensure product quality, and align with ESG standards.

TWIN is not just a technology stack but a governance-first infrastructure. The Foundation will be responsible for setting standards, ecosystem growth, and long-term sustainability. At its Core is an open source, neutral, and financial self-sufficient entity.

“Our agenda is very simple: We want to make it easier and cheaper for countries to trade with each other,” IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener also said. “We are not part of any political agenda, but we are driving forward an economic solution.”

As the project moves into public rollout, IOTA and its partners see TWIN not just as an upgrade to outdated systems—but as a blueprint for the future of international trade. Upcoming expansions and a technical DEEP dive into the infrastructure are expected later this month.

 “Just this week, we have upgraded IOTA to the Rebased protocol,” Schiener added. “Exactly because of this network upgrade, we and our partners are confident that IOTA will be the solution on which trade will be digitized and soon billions of assets tokenized.”

Below is the entire Q&A with Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder of IOTA and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation.

Dominik Schiener: The entire reason why Blockchain was created was to remove borders and barriers to create a frictionless system without intermediaries. We are betting on a future where IOTA is the decentralized, neutral, open, and immutable digital infrastructure that connects countries and people around the world. 

Our agenda is very simple: We want to make it easier and cheaper for countries to trade with each other. We are not part of any political agenda, but we are driving forward an economic solution. Every country wants to trade more, as it leads to prosperity and global access. 

There is a trillion-dollar funding gap in trade finance, and billions of dollars are wasted every year in fraud and inefficiency in a system that is still largely paper-based. TWIN is built to solve these problems. 

DS: TWIN is built and operated by a Swiss non-profit, the TWIN Foundation. The TWIN Foundation has a governance board with several globally renowned organizations (including the IOTA Foundation), which make decisions on how the infrastructure evolves and grows. The mandate of the TWIN Foundation is strictly focused on the open-source development of the solution and its global expansion for the betterment of the global economy. The objective of the Foundation is not to make money from the infrastructure itself, but to ensure its continued expansion by connecting more and more countries. Kenya was just the start, and we aim to bring at least dozens of countries on board over the coming years.

DS: IOTA is and always remains independent and impartial. It is a decentralized network and not controlled by anyone. Our objective since the founding of IOTA has been to work with governments, NGOs, and enterprises to onboard them to the power of permissionless Blockchain networks. We see it as our mission to bring the real world to Web3, and these partnerships with WEF and the Tony Blair Institute are part of realizing this goal.

This, in our view, is the way in which we achieve mainstream adoption and bring new users, use cases and assets onchain. 

DS: The system itself is fully open-source and standardized, and operates as a smart contract infrastructure on IOTA. Meaning that anyone can utilize and participate in TWIN without asking for permission. This means that there is no need for anyone to “govern” the system itself, but rather just make it seamless to use through integrations into port and customs clearing systems to make these tokenized trade documents accessible and accepted. 

All data on TWIN is fully encrypted and owned by the traders themselves. Meaning we are fully GDPR-compliant and self-sovereign. Only if the trader provides consent can data be shared with third parties (e.g., port authorities, customs declarations, or banks for trade finance). 

We leverage the full power of open, permissionless Blockchains, self-sovereign identities and verifiable credentials to build an open, decentralized and secure environment for traders to securely share data across borders.

DS: Just this week, we have upgraded IOTA to the Rebased protocol. This makes IOTA a fully decentralized and production-ready network supporting the MoveVM for programmability on the L1 secured by a decentralized validator set of 150+ validators. Exactly because of this network upgrade, we and our partners are confident that IOTA will be the solution on which trade will be digitized and soon billions of assets tokenized.