In the UAE’s TradeTech Sandbox initiative, IOTA collaborated with the FSRA and engaged with the Kenya Revenue Authority and TradeMark Africa.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has recently highlighted IOTA as one of the key technologies shaping the future of global digital trade and decentralized identity.
This recognition comes from the WEF’s new whitepaper, “Advancing Digital Trade: Insights from the UAE TradeTech Regulatory Sandbox,” published in September 2025.
Salima, an IOTA enthusiast, notes that the report highlights IOTA as a “technological backbone” capable of linking governments, financial institutions, and small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) directly, eliminating the need for intermediaries.
According to WEF research, a single cross-border transaction can involve dozens of documents, hundreds of copies, and multiple stakeholders, creating significant costs and delays.
To tackle persistent inefficiencies in global trade, the Ministry of Foreign Trade of the United Arab Emirates, the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development (ADDED), and the World Economic Forum have collaboratively launched the TradeTech Regulatory Sandbox.
According to the report, “Companies testing innovative documentation technologies reduced processing times from between five and ten days to mere hours.” The sandbox tested solutions across several key areas, including trade documentation, identity and trust systems for small and medium-sized enterprise trade finance, credit assessment, and SME inclusion, as well as digital guarantees and payment settlement.
IOTA participated in the sandbox to demonstrate that its Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN), which is an open-source, decentralized digital infrastructure built on the IOTA distributed ledger technology (DLT), can streamline global trade.
IOTA showed how decentralized identity and tokenized trade data could transform financing for small exporters, and it takes advantage of the Rebased upgrade of the IOTA protocol.
At the 13th WTO Ministerial Conference in early 2024, an agreement to advance the TWIN initiative was formalized, uniting the IOTA Foundation and TradeMark Africa with global partners including the World Economic Forum, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation, and the Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade.
IOTA collaborated with the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) in the UAE’s TradeTech Sandbox, working alongside institutions such as the Kenya Revenue Authority, TradeMark Africa, TradeFlow, and the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF).
This diverse consortium explored how trusted digital identities and authenticated documentation could move seamlessly across borders in real-world trading environments.
Together, they tested a seven-step process that simulated a real-world trade scenario between a Kenyan flower exporter and an international buyer. The process began with the creation of verifiable digital identity credentials for all participants, followed by the establishment of digital wallets linked to these verified identities.
Participants then accessed government-validated trade documents through Kenya’s national trade platform and converted commercial invoices into digital assets with clearly defined ownership.
Using the verified trade and identity data, financing risks were assessed, and capital was distributed through programmable smart contracts. Finally, payment and settlement were automated once the goods successfully reached their destination.
The testing conducted by Empeiria and IOTA demonstrated that digital identity technologies can effectively build trust in cross-border trade transactions, though they still face challenges due to the absence of formal legal recognition.
The report reads,
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