TWIN Foundation Officially Launched, Redefining Global Commerce with IOTA and AfCFTA

A product of years of innovation, collaboration and digital vision, this launch represents a major leap forward in the way international trade is conducted.

The Trade and World Integration Network (TWIN) Foundation was officially launched yesterday in Lusaka during the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol event.

A product of years of innovation, collaboration and digital vision, the launch of the TWIN Foundation marks a significant moment for global commerce.

What began as a bold experiment in 2016, led by IOTA and developed through TLIP (Trade and Logistics Information Pipeline), has now become a global movement with the creation of the TWIN Foundation. The foundation is being built on open-source principles to serve a very specific purpose: to make trade faster, more transparent, more secure and above all, more inclusive. If you work in the spaces where data, identity and trust matter, TWIN is your new home base.

The TWIN Foundation is a non-profit organization tasked with stewarding the global rollout of digital trade infrastructure, with an emphasis on interoperability, transparency and decentralization. In short, it is creating the ‘plumbing’ that powers the digital trade world of tomorrow.

Launched with the support of AfCFTA and alongside key collaborators such as IOTA and TLIP, TWIN is already demonstrating success through pilot projects with the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA). These projects are applying real-world use cases to show how customs, logistics and cross-border documentation can all be streamlined through technology. At its core, the Foundation is proving that digital trade infrastructure is not only a ‘nice-to-have’, but a critical need. By embedding trust and verifiability into data flows, it makes digital trade work at scale, globally.

One of the earliest backers and developers of this system was IOTA technology, known for its feeless, decentralized architecture, which was instrumental in establishing the digital backbone of TWIN. The goal was to eliminate friction in trade caused by paperwork, inconsistent standards and delays in verification.

Deploying IOTA’s distributed ledger technology within the TLIP protocol enabled TWIN to create a system where governments, customs authorities and companies can share verifiable data instantly and securely. The result? Fewer errors, lower costs and better collaboration between trading partners. This isn’t technological evolution, it’s a fundamental reimagining of how we build systems for trade. And it’s happening right now.

One of the strongest aspects of the TWIN Foundation is its emphasis on inclusive trade. By leveraging open-source frameworks, the foundation ensures that small and medium-sized enterprises, start-ups and under-represented regions also get a seat at the table. Whether you’re a local logistics firm in Kenya or a customs agency in Ghana, the infrastructure does not require massive budgets or complex integrations. It’s built to scale, up and down, depending on what each region or partner needs. This is critical in a world where digital inequality can often mirror economic inequality. TWIN isn’t just building systems for the top 1 percent of traders. It’s democratizing access to global trade flows for everyone.

With the official launch behind them, the TWIN Foundation is now looking ahead to expanding its ecosystem. More pilot programs, more public-private partnerships and more countries onboarded into its infrastructure will define the next phase of growth. But perhaps most importantly, this is just the beginning of the journey.

By committing to open standards, decentralization and global collaboration, the TWIN Foundation is setting a new benchmark for how we design digital trade infrastructure that actually works, across borders, sectors and technologies. And as Sir Tony Blair, Executive Chair of the Institute for Global Change, emphasized during the launch, “If we can rebuild trust in how the world trades, we can rebuild prosperity too.”