IOTA Pivots Away From Speculation to Target the $35T Global Trade Market: CEO

• IOTA is pivoting away from crypto speculation after years in the system.
• Current pilots in Kenya and the UK are already tracking millions of shipments and flower stems.
• The ADAPT initiative is attempting to connect 1.5 billion people across Africa by 2035.

The IOTA Foundation recently released a manifesto. Within this document, it mentioned that it was transitioning from simple crypto trading to more international trade. 

Today, most international trade still relies on slow, paper-based processes where one single shipment can involve 30 different organisations and hundreds of document copies. 

This old system creates massive delays, and IOTA believes that its technology can solve these problems by providing a neutral digital layer for everyone to use.

How IOTA Could Change Trade Infrastructure

The current state of international trade is surprisingly manual. Every day, about 4 billion trade documents move around the world. Not only this, but these physical papers account for up to 20% of a shipment’s total value in administrative costs.

Fraud is another major issue because banks lose between $2 billion and $5 billion every year due to forged documents. 

There is also a $2.5 trillion gap in trade finance, where many small businesses cannot get loans because lenders cannot verify their shipments. IOTA is attempting to close these gaps by putting trade data on its public network. 

This creates a “single source of truth” that all parties can trust and unlike private databases owned by a single company, this system is more transparent. 

The TWIN System and Real World Usage

IOTA introduced the Trade Worldwide Information Network (known simply as TWIN) as a major part of this strategy. The network has already moved this new tool to the mainnet and it is already being used in Kenya to track flower exports.

 It currently handles about seven million flower stems every single day and the project is planning to expand this to all Kenyan commodities by the end of March. 

The United Kingdom’s government is also testing this technology. The UK Cabinet Office used TWIN to track more than 2,000 poultry shipments from Poland, and four government employees now work directly with IOTA to expand these trials. 

Trade Expansion Across Africa

The ADAPT initiative is one of the most ambitious aspects of this plan. This stands for Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade and IOTA is working with major partners like the World Economic Forum and the Tony Blair Institute. 

They are doing this to build a combined digital infrastructure for the entire continent, and the goal is to connect 1.5 billion people by the year 2035.

This project could change how business happens in Africa because it aims to cut cross-border payment costs by more than 50%. It also seeks to reduce border wait times from weeks to hours. 

By 2030, the foundation expects the TWIN system to be active in over 30 countries. 

This regional growth would create a massive network effect and Africa is already looking to stablecoins and IOTA to unlock $70 billion in new trade value.

Effect on Network Activity and Tokenomics

The sheer scale of global trade could lead to massive transaction volumes on the IOTA network. 

There are about 2.5 billion consignments shipped across borders every year and each shipment produces roughly 26 separate transactions on the network. If IOTA captures just 1% of this market, it would generate 650 million transactions annually. 

This volume does not even include other uses like digital identity or product passports.

This high level of activity directly affects the network’s economy because transaction fees burn tokens (which reduces the total supply over time). Companies also need to hold tokens to access the network’s storage and resources and currently, users can earn about 11% annually by staking their tokens. 

The goal is to make the network as essential as GPS or the SWIFT banking system. As more trade moves on-chain, the demand for network access should grow.

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