Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

As early as 2015, multiple institutions, including the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Barclays Bank, predicted:

In the high-friction global trade system, blockchain has great transformative potential.

Previously, a cross-border trade often required the involvement of 30 stakeholders, 36 documents, and the circulation of 240 paper copies over weeks; now, for instance, fresh flowers from Kenya can obtain trade documents in less than 5 minutes to export to Europe.

This efficiency is continually realized by the blockchain underlying protocol project IOTA through the global trade digital collaboration infrastructure TWIN.

Since its launch in May 2025, TWIN has made breakthrough progress across three continents: processing over 184,000 invoices in Africa via TLIP; conducting pilots in the UK border infrastructure; and negotiating pilot projects with Asian government and enterprises.

On the occasion of TWIN's first anniversary, we had an in-depth conversation with Jens Munch Lund-Nielsen, the head of the global trade and supply chain division at the IOTA Foundation.

Before joining the IOTA Foundation, Jens worked in the strategy office of one of the world's largest shipping companies, Maersk, focusing on digital trade and public-private collaborations. There, he witnessed the real operational dynamics of the global trade system: vast but inefficient, high-friction and fragmented, with no single party able to truly coordinate everyone.

This experience made Jens more acutely aware that global trade needs an open, neutral, decentralized infrastructure to support multiple participants, such as governments, businesses, and ports, to exchange trusted data in real time within the same system. This also became the core reason for Jens' decision to join the IOTA Foundation:

To promote the development of TWIN, enabling global trade to transition from paper-based, siloed processes to real-time, trustworthy, interconnected digital collaborative workflows.

In this issue, let us follow Jens' sharing and see the real answer in the eyes of this veteran trader regarding why global trade digitization has stalled for over a decade.

From Paper to Chain: Building Global Trade Digital Collaboration Infrastructure

Deep Tide TechFlow: Before we delve into TWIN, could you please introduce yourself briefly, including your background in the global trade sector and what led you to participate in the TWIN project?

Jens:

Hello everyone, I am Jens Munch Lund-Nielsen, currently the head of global trade and supply chain at the IOTA Foundation.

My background mainly focuses on technology, trade facilitation, and digital trade, specifically in building digital products and supporting their global deployment.

Before joining IOTA, I was the head of digital trade in Maersk's strategy office, focusing on trade facilitation, public-private partnerships, and integrating digital solutions into the global supply chain.

The opportunity to engage with TWIN arose because I saw it as a rare chance to address long-standing structural inefficiencies in global trade through a trusted digital system and interoperable technology.

Deep Tide TechFlow: For those unfamiliar with the project, how would you describe TWIN? What is its core essence?

Jens:

Essentially, TWIN is a neutral digital infrastructure for global trade.

Today’s trading system operates on fragmented systems and paper-based processes, largely because no single entity can coordinate all parties involved.

TWIN changes this situation: It provides a common foundational layer where businesses, governments, and various institutions can exchange data, documents, and assets in real time and securely.

TWIN is an open, interoperable network that connects existing systems, strengthens trust through verifiable data, and ensures compliance across jurisdictions without relying on centralized owners.

Built on IOTA, TWIN combines distributed ledger technology with decentralized identity systems, ensuring that each participant maintains control over their data while facilitating global collaboration.

In simple terms:

TWIN is the infrastructure that transitions global trade from paper-based, siloed processes to real-time, trustworthy, interconnected digital collaboration workflows.

Deep Tide TechFlow: What problem does TWIN aim to solve in global trade? Why has this problem remained unresolved for so long?

Jens:

Fundamentally, TWIN aims to address a core coordination issue in global trade: there currently isn’t a shared infrastructure that all participants can trust for seamless data exchange.

Today, trade still largely relies on paper documents and fragmented systems. Information is redundantly entered, delayed in transfer, and often inconsistent among exporters, importers, banks, ports, and customs authorities. This results in inefficiencies, heightened risks, and limited supply chain transparency.

The reason this issue has long remained unresolved is not due to a lack of technology but a lack of "neutrality."

Most previous attempts at trade digitization have essentially built platforms with access restrictions, often led by specific companies, regions, or interest groups. These solutions may be technically viable, but they all face a structural problem:

Other participants are often reluctant to adopt infrastructures seen as "controlled by others." Due to a lack of widespread trust and adoption, these systems have never achieved the scale required for global trade's network effects.

TWIN takes a different approach. It offers an open, neutral, decentralized infrastructure with no single party owning or controlling the entire system. This allows all participants to share data while retaining their sovereignty and meeting their regulatory requirements.

Scalable, Low-cost, Decentralized: IOTA Supports TWIN's Architecture

Deep Tide TechFlow: Why choose IOTA as the underlying infrastructure for TWIN?

Jens:

The reason for choosing IOTA as the foundational infrastructure for TWIN is that it meets the core requirements of the global trade system: scalability, cost efficiency, and neutrality.

IOTA is built on a DAG architecture, which offers strong scalability, enabling the parallel processing of a large number of transactions and data exchanges, which is crucial for global trade as millions of events, documents, and updates continuously occur throughout the supply chain.

It also provides extremely low transaction costs, which is essential in trade scenarios, as such processes involve high-frequency interactions. If every document update, validation, or data exchange incurs significant fees, costs can quickly become unmanageable at scale.

Besides the technology itself, IOTA has over a decade of experience in building real-world infrastructures and has built a solid track record of compliance through collaboration with governments, businesses, and standardization organizations.

Additionally, a very important reason is that IOTA is designed as an open, neutral infrastructure not controlled by any single corporate entity, which aligns closely with the fundamental needs of global trade; trust and sovereignty are key preconditions for different stakeholders' willingness to adopt.

Deep Tide TechFlow: How should we understand the relationship between TWIN and IOTA? Is TWIN an application layer, an ecosystem, or something more macro?

Jens:

The best way to understand TWIN is to view it as a digital public infrastructure for global trade, a shared data and coordination layer connecting governments, businesses, and existing platforms.

In simple terms, TWIN enables all parties to exchange verified, immutable data across borders in real time without relinquishing autonomous control.

Meanwhile, IOTA serves as the underlying foundation. It provides a decentralized trust layer that ensures data integrity, auditability, and interoperability at scale.

From African Flowers to European Poultry: Real Trade Scenarios of TWIN

Deep Tide TechFlow: What are the most specific practical application scenarios being explored or implemented through TWIN?

Jens:

TWIN is currently deployed in multiple real trade scenarios, effectively showcasing how shared digital infrastructure can reduce friction, enhance transparency, and improve the efficiency of global supply chains.

The Trade and Logistics Information Pipeline (TLIP) project connects exporters, logistics providers, and government agencies in East Africa to a shared data pipeline. In pilot projects covering flower, coffee, and tea exports, the retrieval time for inspection documents has been reduced from 6 to 7 hours to about 30 minutes, administrative workloads have decreased by 50%-60%, and exporters save approximately $400 per month on document processing costs.

TWIN has also been tested in the UK government’s "Ecosystem of Trust Trials," involving about 2,000 shipments of refrigerated poultry from Poland to the UK. Border agencies were able to gain visibility into arriving goods earlier (port health officials received data up to 20 hours earlier than standard processes), allowing for more effective resource allocation.

The UK’s "Digital Trade Testbed" (Digital Trade Testbed) will also try out TWIN to support the exchange of digitized international trade information between key border agencies across UK ports.

Other implemented scenarios include:

The RESULD (Responsible Supply Chain and Logistics Due Diligence) project integrates TWIN to trace the fruit and vegetable supply chain between Kenya, the Netherlands, and the UK;

MISSION (Maritime Instant Optimization) project is testing TWIN to enhance port operational efficiency;

Salus leverages TWIN to bring traceability to critical mineral supply chains, converting freight and trade documents into verifiable digital assets for financial institutions for risk assessment and trade financing;

Additionally, ADAPT project, led by the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat in collaboration with the IOTA Foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, and the World Economic Forum, is leveraging IOTA's architecture and TWIN's experience to build a digital trade backbone network for Africa.

Deep Tide TechFlow: When governments and businesses engage with TWIN, what reactions do they typically have? Which sectors do you believe have the highest acceptance currently?

Jens:

After engaging with TWIN, governments and businesses generally see its significant value.

At the government level, departments most directly related to trade, such as trade ministries and customs agencies under finance ministries, can clearly feel TWIN's vast potential to improve internal customs processes, strengthen border control, and better obtain trustworthy data to prevent unauthorized or non-compliant goods from entering.

In the private sector, transportation service providers and freight agents are currently the most involved since they represent producers and growers handling large amounts of border and document processes. The entire industry shows similar expectations and interest in the value that TWIN can create.

Meanwhile, it's very important to emphasize that TWIN's real value comes from the network itself. The more participants connect to TWIN, the greater the value it creates for all participants in the system.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Trade is highly fragmented across different jurisdictions; how does TWIN handle interoperability between different systems, standards, and regulatory environments?

Jens:

International interoperability is one of TWIN's key value drivers, functioning on multiple levels, a crucial part of which is ensuring that systems "speak the same language."

To achieve this, we adopt globally recognized standards, such as the UN/CEFACT and WCO data models, and support and refine these standards through the ICC Digital Standards Initiative.

In terms of identity verification, interoperability primarily relies on national identity registration systems in various countries. Through TWIN ID, we can align a firm's national digital identity with international standards, such as the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) issued by the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), which is also a partner in this project.

From a technical perspective, based on the definition by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), we also observe an increasingly obvious trend of integration around standards such as decentralized identifiers (DID) and verifiable credentials.

Finally, legal interoperability is also important. The UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR) framework is promoting legal recognition of digital trade documents, though its implementation still depends on approval by national governments.

Our experience is that even in countries yet to approve MLETR, relevant work can still initiate; in such cases, we also assist local governments in advancing this process, particularly considering the growing importance of this framework for trade financing scenarios.

Breaking Down Digital Silos, Filling the $2.5 Trillion Trade Finance Gap

Deep Tide TechFlow: How do you view the evolution of global trade in the next 5 to 10 years? What role will decentralized infrastructure play in this transformation?

Jens:

The international trade industry is vast and has been undergoing a digital transformation for the past 10 to 15 years, with governments and businesses upgrading their systems around standardized data models and REST APIs. What is currently lacking is a connection of these "digital silos" in a way that considers data sovereignty, data integrity, and controllable data sharing.

We are currently advancing related projects in over eight countries, maintaining close cooperation with national governments, and continuously seeing strong interest in this area. Thus, I am optimistic:

In the coming years, a trustworthy "connection layer" that connects these systems will truly be realized and scaled. Its impact on global trade, finance, and international trade agreements may be profound, making it an area that is particularly worth watching.

Deep Tide TechFlow: If TWIN were to achieve large-scale success, what would you envision its "end state" to look like? How would global trade operate differently compared to today?

Jens:

In simple terms, as global trade evolves towards fully digital collaboration, many outdated processes will be replaced. Key areas like discovering new business partners and accessing financing channels will differ radically from today.

The world currently faces a trade finance gap of about $2.5 trillion, preventing many businesses from obtaining the capital they need, making it difficult to participate efficiently in global trade.

With digital infrastructure solutions like TWIN, trustworthy data and verifiable digital processes will help release capital access channels on a large scale, potentially reshaping the entire industry's landscape and improving the situation for global traders.