IOTA (IOTA)

Our work on iota is inherently global. We have built an architecture that allows AI models to be trained across the world at scale. Train at Home pulls from the same architecture as our Orion-100B pretraining run - constructed across the open internet, on distributed infrastructure. Read about how we built the Orion-100B run here: https://t.cо/GcKG6BlIQf

Previously I won a Web3 smart phone, the shipment was sent in April and I didn’t get it until June. As an old netizen, I feel a huge disconnect: We can post an article online or transfer money, and it only takes a fraction of a second for the data to be delivered; but why does a cross‑border courier in the physical world become so slow it drives you crazy? I dug into the global transportation model and found that: The real slowdown isn’t the transport vehicles, it’s the stack of paper documents stuck in customs. It’s hard to imagine the hurdles when you ship a batch of fresh roses from a farm in Kenya to a supermarket in the UK. A single ordinary cross‑border transaction can involve up to 30 different stakeholders. From the farm owner, transport fleet, port, customs, to banks and insurance companies, each step requires layered approvals. Behind this are 36 different clearance documents, and there can be as many as 240 paper copies flying around the world. It’s absurd! Long delays and expensive storage fees—these compliance costs can cripple a small‑ or medium‑size enterprise. Is there no solution? Until I recently saw IOTA’s one‑year performance report, I realized the Web3 technology that can truly change the world has been here all along. In a Kenya‑to‑UK export pilot powered by TWIN technology, a remarkable data point emerged: - In the past, processing clearance documents took 8 hours by air and a lengthy 3 weeks by sea. - Now, the process has been unbelievably compressed to under 5 minutes. Even three weeks before the goods actually reach the UK, customs officers can already see all verified supply‑chain data clearly in the system. For local Kenyan exporters, the ultra‑lean digitisation of administrative work saves them about $400 per month on document processing. But after years of digital transformation in cross‑border trade, can the big players still not produce a usable system? In fact, many past attempts failed not because the technology was lacking, but because a trust crisis. Any customs agency, port, or multinational bank is unwilling to hand over its core data to a single commercial giant or specific interest group for control. That is precisely why IOTA and TWIN can break the deadlock. TWIN has built an open, neutral, decentralized “trust infrastructure”. It doesn’t require governments or enterprises to abandon existing systems; instead it provides an interoperable layer at the base. Data sovereignty remains with each participant, yet everyone can smoothly exchange cryptographically‑verified documents. In the past year, TWIN has silently processed over 184,000 real commercial invoices on Africa’s TLIP platform. Their long‑term goal is to cover more than 30 countries worldwide by 2030, and through the ADAPT program, reach Africa’s 1.5 billion people.

@iota @TWINGlobalOrg https://t.co/KLVe6tN6dN

The crypto market has entered a deep bear phase, but good projects are still forging ahead. I spent a week in New York, talking with many project teams; generally, they remain confident about the market. Strangely, this is completely different from what is shown on social media. As far as I know, projects that truly get things done have amassed a pile of positive catalysts waiting to be gradually released. Let's dive in! ⬇️ Crypto information is now truly fragmented; markets driven by price and hype are gradually shrinking. Without the backdrop of a massive bubble wealth effect, attention naturally shifts to more profitable avenues, making AI, stocks, and even the watch market the new favorites of crypto refugees. On the other hand, projects using blockchain technology to transform the global financial and trade systems are making advances, growing wildly in unseen places. This morning I received a push from Hermers tg bot: TWIN has turned one year old. Old friends know I've been tracking the long‑standing @IOTA project; TWIN is the practical implementation of IOTA's ecosystem vision, short for Trade Worldwide Information Network. Just as VISA/Mastercard built a financial clearing system, TWIN is an entire neutral digital infrastructure for global trade, allowing all trade participants to exchange data, documents, and assets within the same trusted network. Not many trade software solutions exist, so what's special about TWIN? This is a real blockchain use case: TWIN fills the gap of a decentralized trusted network, removing reliance on a single entity and putting trust into a code‑neutral model. Since its launch in May last year, TWIN has already completed pilot projects such as Kenya‑UK export, UK border, and Africa's digital public infrastructure ADAPT. For example, export trade from Kenya to the UK involved a massive amount of paper documents; previously, sea shipping took three weeks and air freight eight hours, but with TWIN it only takes five minutes. Typically, even the simplest cross‑border trade order requires interaction among more than 30 parties, 36 documents, and 240 paper copies. TWIN brings huge improvements in security, trustworthiness, and efficiency. Jen, head of the Global Trade and Supply Chain department at the IOTA Foundation, was recently interviewed. If you're interested in this, I strongly recommend watching it—Jen is a veteran in trade and very experienced. Link: https://t.co/xWOzBk0Dv4 / Lately I've been insanely busy; even during a bull market I wasn't this occupied. I've encountered a huge number of projects similar to IOTA, which are also deploying blockchain applications in the bear market. In contrast, many hype projects barely update their Twitter in a bear market, or occasionally chase hype, post memes, or engage in useless partnership talks… just waiting for another chance to grab a profit. I'm saying this with the simplest mindset: if you still believe in blockchain or the crypto space, ...

The headline of an old public chain's comeback—over the past few years I've seen it reach at most eighty or ninety percent, never a full hundred. It's usually just the community releasing a roadmap, posting a partnership poster, getting hype for three days and then falling silent. I'm very familiar with this pattern, so when I opened the one‑year summary of TWIN these past couple of days, I didn't have high expectations. But! This summary contains no roadmap. It lists real countries, real ports, real cargo. The African line TLIP processed over 180,000 commercial invoices and more than 300,000 declarations; the UK border piloted over 2,000 batches of frozen poultry shipped from Poland, with data able to reach regulators up to twenty hours earlier; export documents from Kenya to the UK that used to take eight hours by air or three weeks by sea can now be obtained within five minutes. The UK government also deployed four cabinet office staff to work full‑time on the project for a whole year. Moreover, its ambition goes beyond that. At the end of last year, @iota partnered with the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat, the World Economic Forum, and the Tony Blair Institute to launch a program called ADAPT, built directly on TWIN. The goal is to connect all 55 African countries into a single open digital trade infrastructure by 2035, doubling intra‑African trade and unlocking over $70 billion in additional trade volume. In May this year, the first steps were taken, with Kenya, Morocco, and Nigeria becoming the first three countries to implement the solution, covering East, North, and West Africa respectively. This is no longer a single project pilot—it’s a continent in motion. I stared at those numbers for a long time because this is not a speculation about how blockchain might change trade in the future; it's a record of changes already happening. A single cross‑border transaction can involve thirty stakeholders, thirty‑six documents, and over two hundred paper copies. This mess is not a trivial Web3 issue; it's a mountain of waste that global trade has accumulated over decades without being cleared. What IOTA is doing now is turning the blockchain into the layer of trust and audit within trade, rather than launching another on‑chain application that is forgotten after a hundred days. TWIN has been live for only a year, yet it has already moved from a concept to a real pilot spanning Africa and the UK. While this pace might not seem fast in the Web3 world, when you place it in the context of global trade you realize how difficult it is! It requires negotiating with each government, customs authority, port, and exporter, turning processes that no one is willing to relinquish control over into a network that everyone can use and that no single party dominates. Pushing this to implementation within a year already says a lot. In a bull market, everyone competes over who tells the most polished story; in a bear market, you can see clearly who is quietly getting things done. Too many projects on the market talk about a story they can't even explain where it will be implemented, whereas over the past ten years @iota seems to have slowly turned that story into flowers in East Africa, poultry in Poland, and the $400 per month saved by a Kenyan exporter.

Train at Home is being used around the globe. At the moment, there are participants in 16 countries across three continents. All are contributing to distributed training. https://t.co/euD0nmJRsE

Professional matters should be handled by professionals. Some people are suited for technology, others for operations; forcing someone who only knows tech to lead a project will only result in chaos. In this regard, the ten‑year‑old public blockchain IOTA has done a great job. Jens Munch Lund‑Nielsen, head of the Global Trade and Supply Chain department at the IOTA Foundation and a core driver of the IOTA TWIN project, previously served as Digital Trade Lead at Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company. No wonder the IOTA TWIN project has taken off; over the past year it has achieved the following major milestones ⬇️ - In May 2025, the TWIN Foundation was officially established, jointly initiated by the IOTA Foundation, TradeMark Africa, the Tony Blair Institute, the World Economic Forum and others, positioned as a neutral global public digital infrastructure for trade. - Significant progress in Africa: operational‑level deployment in scenarios such as Kenyan flower exports, and collaboration with AfCFTA to advance the ADAPT program, promoting digitalization of intra‑African trade. - Breakthrough in the UK border pilot: trade data can be delivered to regulators up to 20 hours earlier, and together with Teesside University and the UK government, the digital trade testing platform at Teesside Port has been launched. - European trade corridor validation: completed pilot verification of over 2,000 batches of poultry trade from Poland to the UK, accumulating real cross‑border data. If major project teams understood the principle of assigning the right people to the right roles—eliminating CX doing CX and letting tech experts focus on technology—it wouldn't be this bleak now.

Web3 loves doing things quickly—whether it's posting a meme, launching a copy‑cat DeFi, or spinning up a flashy AI hype concept, you can harvest a round of wealth in the secondary market within months. But when the hype subsides and the market returns to rationality, people realize that doing slow things, doing the right things, and doing important things can actually take you farther. The 10‑year‑old @iota and its key ecosystem driver TWIN fully demonstrate this. No need for filler—here are the numbers. 1. In the TLIP scenario in Africa, the system has already processed over 184,000 commercial invoices, 328,000 declarations, and issued more than 2,000 export certificates. Of course, I admit these figures may not seem huge, but their significance lies not in sheer scale but in showing that TWIN has entered real‑trade document flow. Once the scenario and processes are connected, rapid data growth will become a reality. 2. A more tangible example comes from the Kenya‑to‑UK export pilot. Previously, trade documents might have taken 8 hours by air or three weeks by sea before they could be used. Now with TWIN, documents can be retrieved within minutes, and border regulators can see trustworthy data three weeks before the goods arrive. In the UK border pilot, data for chilled poultry shipments from Poland to the UK can be delivered to border authorities up to 20 hours in advance. For the Web3 industry, these may not sound as exciting as a ‘hundred‑times token’, but for real international trade they are the best examples of efficiency gains and genuine blockchain use: faster documents, earlier clearance, lower costs, and more transparent regulation. For traditional enterprises, we see that processes that once took weeks or hours can now be compressed into ‘5 minutes’. This efficiency translates into real cost reductions in logistics and warehousing, and provides a ticket for more small and medium exporters to compete internationally. By the way, this data was achieved during a Web3 bear market. Some projects ‘play ostrich’ in a bear market, while others tirelessly ‘lay the foundation’. When I was in school, my father always told me: ‘slow is fast.’ It means do the right thing first, then do it correctly. If it’s the wrong thing, no amount of speed adds value. I’ve been practicing this ever since. Few Web3 projects embody this philosophy; BTC is one, ETH is one, BNB is one, and IOTA is one as well.

Web3 loves doing things quickly—whether it's posting a meme, launching a copy‑cat DeFi, or spinning up a flashy AI hype concept, you can harvest a round of wealth in the secondary market within months. But when the hype subsides and the market returns to rationality, people realize that doing slow things, doing the right things, and doing important things can actually take you farther. The 10‑year‑old @iota and its key ecosystem driver TWIN fully demonstrate this. No need for filler—here are the numbers. 1. In the TLIP scenario in Africa, the system has already processed over 184,000 commercial invoices, 328,000 declarations, and issued more than 2,000 export certificates. Of course, I admit these figures may not seem huge, but their significance lies not in sheer scale but in showing that TWIN has entered real‑trade document flow. Once the scenario and processes are connected, rapid data growth will become a reality. 2. A more tangible example comes from the Kenya‑to‑UK export pilot. Previously, trade documents might have taken 8 hours by air or three weeks by sea before they could be used. Now with TWIN, documents can be retrieved within minutes, and border regulators can see trustworthy data three weeks before the goods arrive. In the UK border pilot, data for chilled poultry shipments from Poland to the UK can be delivered to border authorities up to 20 hours in advance. For the Web3 industry, these may not sound as exciting as a ‘hundred‑times token’, but for real international trade they are the best examples of efficiency gains and genuine blockchain use: faster documents, earlier clearance, lower costs, and more transparent regulation. For traditional enterprises, we see that processes that once took weeks or hours can now be compressed into ‘5 minutes’. This efficiency translates into real cost reductions in logistics and warehousing, and provides a ticket for more small and medium exporters to compete internationally. By the way, this data was achieved during a Web3 bear market. Some projects ‘play ostrich’ in a bear market, while others tirelessly ‘lay the foundation’. When I was in school, my father always told me: ‘slow is fast.’ It means do the right thing first, then do it correctly. If it’s the wrong thing, no amount of speed adds value. I’ve been practicing this ever since. Few Web3 projects embody this philosophy; BTC is one, ETH is one, BNB is one, and IOTA is one as well.