Interview with IOTA Foundation's Jens: From Kenya to the UK, TWIN Propels Global Trade into the "5-Minute" Era
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Interview with IOTA Foundation's Jens: From Kenya to the UK, TWIN Propels Global Trade into the "5-Minute" Era
Follow Jens' sharing and let's take a look at the real answer to why global trade digitization has been stuck for over a decade, from the perspective of this veteran trader.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: 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 holds immense transformative potential.
Previously, a single cross-border trade transaction typically involved 30 stakeholders, 36 documents, and 240 paper copies circulating over several weeks; now, for flower exports from Kenya to Europe, trade documents can be obtained in less than 5 minutes.
This is the efficiency continuously realized by the blockchain underlying protocol project IOTA through the global trade digital collaboration infrastructure TWIN.
Since its launch in May 2025, TWIN has achieved breakthrough progress across three continents: processing over 184,000 invoices via TLIP in Africa; piloting within UK border infrastructure; and negotiating pilot projects with government and enterprise entities in Asia.
On the occasion of TWIN's first anniversary, we had an in-depth conversation with Jens Munch Lund-Nielsen, Head of Global Trade and Supply Chain at the IOTA Foundation.
Before joining the IOTA Foundation, Jens worked in the Strategy Office of Maersk, one of the world's largest shipping companies, focusing on digital trade and public-private partnerships. There, he witnessed firsthand how the global trade system truly operates: massive but inefficient, high-friction and fragmented, with no single party able to truly coordinate everyone.
This experience made Jens realize more clearly: global trade needs an open, neutral, decentralized infrastructure that supports multiple participants such as governments, enterprises, and ports to exchange trusted data in real time within the same system. This also became the core reason for Jens choosing to join the IOTA Foundation:
Driving the development of TWIN to enable global trade to truly move from paper-based and siloed processes to real-time, trusted, and interconnected digital collaboration workflows.
In this issue, let us follow Jens' sharing to see the real answer to the digitalization of global trade that has been stuck for over a decade in the eyes of this veteran trader.
From Paper to Chain: Building Global Trade Digital Collaboration Infrastructure
TechFlow: Before delving into TWIN, could you please briefly introduce yourself, including your background in the global trade field and what prompted your involvement in the TWIN project?
Jens:
Hello everyone, I am Jens Munch Lund-Nielsen, currently serving as Head of Global Trade and Supply Chain at the IOTA Foundation.
My background focuses mainly on technology, trade facilitation, and digital trade, with a particular emphasis on building digital products and supporting their global deployment.
Before joining IOTA, I served as Head of Digital Trade in the Maersk Strategy Office, focusing on integrating trade facilitation, public-private partnerships, and digital solutions into the global supply chain.
The opportunity to join TWIN arose because I believe it offers a rare chance to address the long-standing structural inefficiencies in global trade through trusted digital systems and interoperable technology.
TechFlow: For those unfamiliar with this project, how would you describe TWIN? What is its core essence?
Jens:
Essentially, TWIN is a set of neutral digital infrastructure oriented towards global trade.
Today's trade system operates on fragmented systems and paper-based processes because no single party is able to coordinate all participants.
TWIN changes this situation: it provides a common base layer that allows enterprises, governments, and various institutions to exchange data, documents, and assets on it in real time and securely.
TWIN is an open, interoperable network that connects existing systems, strengthens trust through verifiable data, and achieves cross-jurisdictional compliance without relying on a centralized owner.
TWIN is built on IOTA, combining distributed ledger technology with decentralized identity systems, ensuring that each participant can always control their own data while enabling global collaboration.
Simply put:
TWIN is the infrastructure that enables global trade to move from paper-based and siloed processes to real-time, trusted, and interconnected digital collaboration workflows.
TechFlow: Which problem in global trade is TWIN dedicated to solving? Why has this problem remained unresolved for so long?
Jens:
Fundamentally, what TWIN aims to solve is a core coordination problem in global trade: currently, there is no infrastructure that all participants can share and trust each other to achieve seamless data exchange.
Today, trade still relies heavily on paper documents and fragmented systems. Information is repeatedly entered, delayed, and often inconsistent among exporters, importers, banks, ports, and customs authorities. This causes inefficiency, increases risk, and limits supply chain transparency.
This problem has remained unresolved for a long time not because of a lack of technology, but because of a lack of "neutrality."
Most previous attempts at trade digitalization were essentially building platforms with access restrictions, often driven by specific enterprises, regions, or interest groups. These solutions might be technically feasible, but they all face a structural problem:
Other participants are often unwilling to adopt infrastructure perceived as "controlled by others." Due to a lack of widespread trust and adoption, these systems have never reached the scale of network effects required for global trade.
TWIN takes a different path. It provides open, neutral, decentralized infrastructure, with no single party owning or controlling the entire system. This allows all participants to retain their own sovereignty while sharing data and meeting their respective regulatory requirements.
Scalable, Low-Cost, Decentralized: Underlying IOTA Supports TWIN Architecture
TechFlow: Why was IOTA chosen as the underlying infrastructure for TWIN?
Jens:
The reason for choosing IOTA as the underlying 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 and has strong scalability, capable of processing a large volume of transactions and data exchanges in parallel, which is crucial for global trade because millions of events, documents, and updates are continuously occurring every moment across the entire supply chain.
It also provides extremely low transaction costs, which is crucial in trade scenarios because such processes generate high-frequency interactions. If every file update, verification, or data exchange required paying a considerable fee, costs would quickly become unbearable at scale.
Beyond the technology itself, IOTA also has over ten years of experience building real-world infrastructure and has accumulated a solid track record of performance through collaborations with governments, enterprises, and standardization bodies.
Additionally, another very important reason is that IOTA is designed as open, neutral infrastructure, not controlled by a single corporate entity, which aligns highly with the fundamental needs of global trade; trust and sovereignty are precisely the key prerequisites for different stakeholders to be willing to adopt it.
TechFlow: How should the relationship between TWIN and IOTA be understood? Is TWIN an application layer, an ecosystem, or something more macro?
Jens:
The most appropriate way to understand TWIN is to view it as digital public infrastructure for global trade, a shared data and coordination layer connecting governments, enterprises, and existing platforms.
Simply put, TWIN enables parties to exchange verified, immutable data across borders in real time without giving up autonomous control.
IOTA lies beneath it, existing as the underlying infrastructure layer. It provides a decentralized trust layer, ensuring data integrity, auditability, and interoperability under large-scale operations.
From African Flowers to European Poultry: TWIN Global Real Trade Scenario Implementation
TechFlow: What are the most specific practical application scenarios currently being explored or implemented through TWIN?
Jens:
TWIN is currently deployed in multiple real trade scenarios, demonstrating well how shared digital infrastructure can reduce friction, increase transparency, and improve global supply chain efficiency.
The Trade and Logistics Information Pipeline (TLIP) project connects exporters, logistics service providers, and government agencies in East Africa to a shared data pipeline. In pilot projects covering flower, coffee, and tea exports, document retrieval time for inspection was reduced from 6 to 7 hours to about 30 minutes, administrative workload decreased by 50% - 60%, and exporters saved approximately $400 per month on document processing costs.
TWIN was also tested in the UK government's "Ecosystem of Trust Trials", which involved approximately 2,000 batches of chilled poultry shipments from Poland to the UK. Border agencies were able to gain visibility of arriving goods earlier (port health officers obtained data up to over 20 hours earlier than the standard process), thereby enabling more effective resource allocation.
The UK's "Digital Trade Testbed (Digital Trade Testbed)" will also trial TWIN to support the exchange of digital international trade information between various UK ports and key border agencies.
Other implementation scenarios also include:
The RESULD (Responsible Supply Chain and Logistics Due Diligence) project integrated TWIN to trace the fruit and vegetable supply chain between Kenya, the Netherlands, and the UK;
The MISSION (Maritime Instant Optimization) project is trialing TWIN to improve port operational efficiency;
Salus leverages TWIN to bring traceability to the critical minerals supply chain, converting freight and trade documents into verifiable digital assets for financial institutions to use for risk assessment and issuing trade finance;
In addition, the ADAPT project, led by the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat and jointly promoted by the IOTA Foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, and the World Economic Forum, is building a digital trade backbone network for Africa leveraging IOTA's architecture and TWIN's experience.
TechFlow: When governments and enterprises encounter TWIN, what is their usual reaction? Which areas do you currently think have the highest acceptance?
Jens:
After encountering TWIN, governments and enterprises generally can see its significant value.
At the government level, departments most directly related to trade, such as Ministries of Trade and customs departments under Ministries of Finance, can clearly feel the huge potential of TWIN in improving internal clearance processes, strengthening border control, and better accessing trusted data to prevent unauthorized or non-compliant goods from entering.
In the private sector, the highest participation currently comes from transport service providers and freight forwarders, because they themselves handle a large volume of border and document processes on behalf of producers and growers. The entire industry also shows a similar level of expectation and interest in the value TWIN can create.
At the same time, another point worth emphasizing is: the true value of TWIN comes from the network itself. The more participants access TWIN, the greater the value the entire system creates for all participants.
TechFlow: Trade is highly fragmented between different jurisdictions; how does TWIN handle interoperability between different systems, standards, and regulatory environments?
Jens:
International interoperability is one of TWIN's most critical value drivers; it operates at multiple levels, and a very important part is ensuring that various systems "speak the same language."
To this end, we have adopted globally recognized standards, such as data models from the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and the World Customs Organization (WCO), and further support and refine these standards through the ICC Digital Standards Initiative.
In terms of identity authentication, interoperability is mainly driven by relying on national identity registration systems of various countries. Through TWIN ID, we can align enterprises' national-level digital identities with international standards, such as the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) issued by the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), which is also a partner of this project.
From a technical perspective, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) definitions, we also observe an increasingly obvious convergence trend around standards such as Decentralized Identifiers (DID) and Verifiable Credentials.
Finally, interoperability at the legal level is equally important. The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law's Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR) framework is promoting legal recognition of digital trade documents, though its implementation still depends on approval by governments of various countries.
Our experience is that even in countries that have not yet approved MLETR, related work can already be initiated; in such cases, we will also assist local governments in advancing this process, especially considering that the importance of this framework for trade finance scenarios is becoming increasingly prominent.
Breaking Digital Silos, Filling the $2.5 Trillion Trade Finance Gap
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 massive and has been in the process of digital transformation over the past 10 to 15 years, with governments and enterprises upgrading their systems around the use of standardized data models and REST APIs. The missing link today is connecting these "digital silos" in a way that balances data sovereignty, data integrity, and controlled data sharing.
We are currently advancing related projects in more than eight countries, maintaining close cooperation with governments of various countries, and continuously seeing strong interest in this field. Therefore, I am optimistic about this:
In the coming years, a trusted "connection layer" connecting these systems will truly be implemented and scaled. Its potential impact on global trade, finance, and international trade agreements will be profound, making it an area particularly worth attention.
TechFlow: If TWIN can achieve large-scale success, what do you think its "end state" would look like? Compared to today, how will global trade operate in a different way?
Jens:
Simply put, as global trade evolves towards fully digital collaboration, many old and outdated processes will be replaced. Some key areas, such as discovering new business partners and accessing financing channels, will be completely different from today.
Currently, the world faces a trade finance gap of approximately $2.5 trillion, causing many enterprises to be unable to obtain the capital needed and difficult to participate efficiently in global trade.
With digital infrastructure solutions like TWIN, trusted data and verifiable digital processes will help unlock capital access channels on a large scale, thereby potentially reshaping the entire industry landscape and improving the situation of global traders.
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