⌠ Dissecting the path IOTA wants to take from my perspective ⌡

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Many years ago, I used to run a sneaker purchasing business and did some wholesale, so I have some research on large-scale imports. Regarding containers, assuming a container goes from Asia to Europe, there are actually at least over thirty participants and more than 200 to 300 documents involved in the process, including bills of lading, insurance, letters of credit, customs data, and so on, being signed and transmitted back and forth among banks, customs, and stakeholders. It is actually very inefficient.
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According to research estimates, if these documents were fully digitized, it could save billions of dollars in costs each year and generate hundreds of billions of dollars in additional trade volume. However, the problem is that everyone knows there is a pie to eat, but the real bottleneck is never a technical issue; it is always trust. This is because everyone does not recognize each other, and no one is willing to entrust these highly sensitive and commercially valuable data to any company or platform for safekeeping.
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The core of @IOTA's transformation in this round is to address this issue head-on. Many people's impressions of it are still stuck in its early days of small payments in the Internet of Things (including myself, who thought this way before researching), but recently they have gradually shifted their focus to become a public blockchain specifically for "trust infrastructure."

After the #Rebased upgrade in 2025, the mainnet's performance has reached the status of a high-performance chain, and it possesses complete smart contract and asset tokenization capabilities, sufficient to handle high-frequency business for enterprises and governments. More importantly, these functions are organized into a set of IOTA Trust Framework, which focuses on several key aspects that RWA cares about the most: identity, documents, permissions, and auditing.
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In this framework, the most critical piece is called #TWIN, which is a non-profit foundation jointly initiated by the World Economic Forum, the Tony Blair Institute, the IOTA Foundation, and several governments and regional organizations, aimed at global trade public infrastructure. The design philosophy of TWIN is simple: data remains in the hands of the enterprises themselves, and only proof that "this document exists and has not been tampered with" will be anchored on IOTA. When customs, banks, or partners need to verify, the document can be securely transmitted among participants through standardized node Connectors, and its authenticity can be verified using the on-chain Hash.

This approach directly bypasses the obstacles that TradeLens faced in its early years, as TWIN does not have a true commercial core. It is governed collaboratively by multiple parties, allowing competing shipping companies, banks, and governments to utilize the same infrastructure without worrying that one party has an advantage over the others, while still being able to be tracked and audited.
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The actual effects can already be seen in the East Africa pilot. In the TLIP project, Kenya and Rwanda have connected the main trade documents to this framework, reducing cross-border clearance time from several hours to half an hour, and significantly lowering the costs of manual document processing. This is a real case of effective usage.
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In addition, Africa's #ADAPT, led by the AfCFTA Secretariat, is collaborating with organizations like IOTA and WEF to create a set of shared digital public infrastructure for the fifty-five member countries, integrating identity, documentation, and payments seamlessly. Documents are tokenized into verifiable digital assets, goods in warehouses can be tokenized for collateral financing, and cross-border payments combine stablecoins, reducing clearance times and costs significantly compared to today's levels.
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If we shift our perspective to Europe, the upcoming Digital Product Passport will clarify TWIN's positioning. In the future, every product entering the EU may need to be accompanied by a digital passport that includes information on origin, supply chain trajectory, carbon footprint, and recycling information. TWIN, combined with IOTA's Tokenization, can transform bills of lading, warehouse receipts, and insurance certificates into on-chain assets, giving physical products their own digital identity and full traceability. This is especially important for high-sensitivity industries such as food, luxury goods, and pharmaceuticals. In a way, it resembles what I envision RWA should look like. (I really like the idea of luxury goods; my award-winning blockchain verification project from university was focused on this.)
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Therefore, we can roughly assume that there are billions of cargo shipments globally each year. Even if only one percent of the cargo processes are connected to this system, the multiple documents, nodes, and status updates involved will significantly amplify the actual on-chain record demand. Coupled with the fee burning mechanism, the more trade volume there is in the real world, the clearer the demand and destruction of the tokens will be. In the long run, there is a chance to form a flywheel where usage drives value.

IOTA has chosen the most difficult path this time. It has spent many years transforming itself from an experimental project into a trusted foundation that meets the needs of governments, international organizations, and enterprises. It has already created a moat through TWIN and ADAPT in East Africa, the African continent, and the upcoming European digital product passport.
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My own conclusion is that if global trade starts to seriously move onto the blockchain in the next ten years, I believe that IOTA is already in a very critical position. It may not necessarily be the only answer, but it is currently one of the few participants that have accumulated experience and achieved results. What we need to watch next is whether these pilot projects can truly spread into recognized standards, bringing more ports, banks, customs, and small and medium enterprises into the same system.
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#CharmingPost #Collab