IOTA Targets $35T Trade Market With New Infrastructure Strategy

Source: CryptoNewsNet Original Title: IOTA Targets $35T Trade Market With New Infrastructure Strategy Original Link:

IOTA is changing direction

IOTA is stepping away from speculative crypto trends and moving toward real world trade infrastructure. The shift targets a massive market. Global trade moves between $30 trillion and $35 trillion each year.

IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener announced this week that the project’s strategic focus has shifted from the speculative crypto sector to building infrastructure for the $35 trillion global trade market. The initiative aims to solve traditional trade inefficiencies through vertical integration of digital identity, real world asset tokenization, and trade finance on a single blockchain.

IOTA shifts focus to global trade infrastructure

Traditional trade still runs on outdated systems. Documents move slowly, data sits in silos, border checks take days and financing is hard to access. IOTA believes this is where blockchain actually fits. The strategy centers on vertical integration. That means trade documents, digital identity, asset tokenization and payments all work together. Everything runs on IOTA’s Layer-1 network. The goal is to make trade faster, cheaper and transparent. Rather than serving traders and speculators, IOTA wants to serve exporters, importers, logistics firms and governments.

TWIN network goes live with real deployments

The Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN) is now live on the IOTA mainnet, having started rolling out in early January 2026. TWIN digitizes trade documents and tracks shipments in real time. Shipments are represented as tokenized records which allows for instant verification across borders.

Kenya serves as a key example of this technology in action. TWIN integrates with the national trade system, focusing first on flower exports that ship millions of stems each day. Earlier pilots reduced customs clearance from days to hours.

The UK also tested TWIN. The Cabinet Office used it for EU to UK freight. More than 2,000 poultry shipments from Poland were tracked between 2024 and 2025. Data quality improved and border checks became smoother. IOTA plans to expand to all Kenyan commodities first, then launch pilots in at least five more countries in 2026.

ADAPT aims to unlock African trade

IOTA is working with global partners including the World Economic Forum and the AfCFTA Secretariat to support ADAPT, a program focused on African digital trade infrastructure. Doubling intra-African trade could unlock tens of billions in yearly value by 2035. ADAPT uses digital documents, self-sovereign identity and stablecoin payments to cut fraud and speed up settlement. Early work is happening in Kenya, Ghana and Rwanda, with more countries to follow in 2026.

Rebased upgrade supports scale and token utility

IOTA completed its Rebased upgrade in May 2025, bringing Move-based smart contracts and full decentralization. The upgrade supports very high throughput and fast finality. IOTA introduced small transaction fees, with part of these fees getting burned, creating deflation when network usage grows.

The model adjusts based on demand and supports sponsored transactions to keep the system user-friendly. With this setup, IOTA can handle millions of trade transactions each year. The vision is for IOTA to become the digital backbone of onchain trade—not a hype token or meme, but quiet infrastructure for how the world moves goods.