IOTA to Power Real World Asset Tokenization of Minerals in $2.5 Trillion Trade Finance Market

• IOTA is working alongside Salus, a next-generation platform that’s enhancing how the world finances and trades critical minerals.
• Tokenization on IOTA means representing real or digital assets, such as real estate and carbon credits, as tokens on its decentralized ledger.

International payments, shipping, and customs often rely on paperwork, legacy banking rails, and manual reconciliation. For example, cross-border payments still pass through middlemen like SWIFT, a system built in the 1970s. While it works, it’s slow, costly, and not designed for the speed and complexity of today’s digital economy.

The IOTA team has announced on its X account that

Dominik Schiener, the co-founder of the Iota Foundation, commented on this collaboration, stating, “Real assets, real yield, real impact. That’s what IOTA stands for.” Through its work with Salus, IOTA is pushing to turn this vision into reality, targeting the $2.5 trillion trade finance gap with tokenization as the driving force.

For those unfamiliar, Salus is a digital trade finance platform focused on critical minerals and commodities. Salus connects verified mineral suppliers with qualified funders, using a mix of on-chain technology, smart contracts, and compliance tools.

Identity, Tokenization, and Data Sovereignty

Minerals like copper, lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements are the backbone of the global energy transition.  Their surge in demand is colliding with supply-side challenges. Mining and refining capacity often lags behind consumption, with new projects taking years or even decades to come online.

This is where Salus, together with IOTA and the TWIN platform, is fixing things. IOTA’s report explains that there are three pillars that hold this partnership together: identity, tokenization, and data sovereignty.

Here, IOTA Identity is being used to manage not only the digital identities of the people and companies involved in the minerals supply chain, but also of physical assets like containers, transporters, and even the goods themselves. Every party and object in the system can be uniquely recognized without relying on a centralized authority by using decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials.

This makes it possible to turn essential trade documents, like warehouse receipts and bills of lading that represent ownership, into secure, verifiable digital assets, NFTs.

Salus is also using IOTA Smart Contracts to automate the nuts and bolts of trade finance. This includes transferring ownership titles to managing collateral. These contracts aren’t isolated; they plug directly into the live data recorded through Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN).

As noted in our earlier post, this means digital documents and updates are automatically linked to the ledger, creating a transparent, traceable record of every transaction and status change.

According to IOTA, this design lines up with international digital trade standards like the Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR), ensuring that these digital flows of ownership and finance don’t just work locally but across borders and jurisdictions.

Salus is also leveraging IOTA’s Gas Station model. Each TWIN node integrates a gas station, allowing Salus, as the operator, to use IOTA tokens to cover transaction fees for its users, such as investors. This means participants don’t need to worry about acquiring or managing IOTA tokens themselves. For them, the process is hassle-free, while under the hood, IOTA’s technology ensures transactions are secure, fee-less for the user, and globally scalable.