- World trade has several serious problems, many of which have been burned into the system for decades.
- The Twin Foundation solves this by introducing an open source digital infrastructure powered by Iota’s Feeless Distributed Ledger.
The IOTA Foundation collaborated with five heavyweight partners, Trademark Africa, the World Economic Forum, the Tony Blair Institute’s Global Change, Global Alliance, and the Institute for Export and International Trade to launch the Twin Foundation.
Announced May 8 at the AFCFTA Digital Trade Forum in Lusaka, Zambia, the initiative aims to completely rewire the way global trade works by building open, decentralized infrastructure that anyone can access.
In today’s X post, the IOTA team revealed that Twin already has over 54 decentralized validators and is steadily expanding. They shared a video featuring founding partners talking about what they created.
“First of all, it’s open access. No one owns it,” said Frank Matsaert, a global leader in trade and infrastructure, a member of the Tony Blair Institute and the Twin Board.
To reflect this, Tim Stickinker from the World Economic Forum has been added.
There have been commercial attempts before, but they have failed. Where they failed, we believe we can succeed. Because unlike early initiatives promoted by private sector owners, such systems require neutral and fair conditions to flourish.
And they were right, the old system was messed up. Trade was still trapped in the dark ages of paper documents, fax machines and closed databases that could not speak to each other. It meant infinite delays due to validation, repeated data entry, and too many human errors.
Customs processes, licensing and clearance procedures vary widely across countries, allowing goods to spend weeks where they could collect dust at the port, earn costs, and raise prices. Worse, governments, shippers and buyers often had to make decisions based on outdated or incomplete data. This is intervening to dismantle the old, fragmented system twin.
In July, IOTA deployed an updated white paper for the twins. At the heart of the twins is their use of digital identity and tampered document trails. This is a big deal for global logistics.
This new protocol can bridge the gap between the various data standards used worldwide, and can consider GS1 and EPCIS 2.0, allowing information to travel smoothly and consistently throughout the supply chain. In addition, the twin uses IOTA’s decentralized trust mechanism. This means that businesses can instantly verify claims such as certifications and operational history without relying on slow, paper-based checks.
Governance is not excluded. The twins are run by the IOTA Foundation, the World Trade Organization and the Council that brings together government agencies. They vote for fixes and protocol updates, syncing everything and moving forward.
IOTA Network Performance
Crypto News Flash reports that it has only hit a 100-day milestone since the IOTA network itself upgraded its mainnet, showing rock solid stability and steady growth. During that time, it processed around 170 million transactions, deployed 300 new smart contract packages, reaching a peak of 4,734 TP over 30 days.
A real kicker? In May, IOTA launched a rebase protocol, replacing old Stardust systems and boosted throughput to over 50,000 transactions per second. The market also noticed.
At the time of writing, IOTA is trading at $0.202,269 with a market capitalization of $791 million, with a recent decline in trading volume. 36% down $44.02M.
