- IOTA Foundation, World Economic Forum (WEF), and four other entities have joined hands to launch the TWIN Foundation to set best practices and standards for global trade.
- TWIN Foundation is reported to focus on financial sustainability, non-profit, and open source, etc.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has confirmed its involvement in the formation of the TWIN Foundation, which is meant to develop a more inclusive, efficient, and transparent trade ecosystem. As highlighted in our previous news report, the TWIN Foundation was officially launched on May 8 at the AfCFTA Digital Trade Forum, held in Lusaka, Zambia.
Together with five other organizations – “The Chartered Institute of Exports and International Trade, TradeMark Africa, the IOTA Foundation, the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation, and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change”, WEF would ensure that the Foundation takes charge of the technical and the operational design of the Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN).
Additionally, they would ensure that the best practices and standards are set and complied with while encouraging financial sustainability. Above all, it would focus on ecosystem support, custodian of core infrastructure, non-profit and open source, and a network of success.
The TWIN initiative has been one of the most sustainable projects on IOTA and was originally designed to enable global supply chains to instantly and securely share data. As discussed earlier, it emerged as one of the main topics of discussion at the recently held “IOTA East Africa Web3 Innovation Summit” in Nairobi, Kenya.
More About TWIN and Other IOTA Projects
According to reports, the platform enables the uploading of relevant documents while allowing users to choose with whom to share data, without compromising the original ownership.
Commenting on its impact so far, the head of global trade and supply chains at the Iota Foundation, Jens Munch Lund-Nielsen, highlighted that TWIN was designed to collaborate with governments. By focusing on Kenya, it has been able to tap into the country’s single window for trade – the Kenya TradeNet System.
Shedding more light on this, Lund-Nielsen explained that the foundation has already been laid as exporters have uploaded documents on the platform to obtain export licenses. Basically, this makes it easier for TWIN to transfer the export data from the Kenya TradeNet System to its own platform. According to him, this allows permissioned access to the public to confirm that the data has not been modified.
Kenya raised their hand, so we have implemented this with a single-window system with Kenyan revenue authorities and border forces…Until now, we’ve been used to, if you have something digital, you can mass copy it. When you can mass copy, you can manipulate. Trust completely goes away from the digital area, so we stay with the paper and the stamps.
In the future, TWIN has been said to focus on the “digital corridors” between nations. Meanwhile, IOTA has recently been working on multiple projects, including the IOTA Identity, which was highlighted by CNF to be mainnet-ready. As also detailed in our recent blog post, IOTA is set to start a hackathon event in Malaysia from July 19 to July 21.
