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GLEIF and IOTA Foundation partner on digitalisation of global trade


17 September 2025 Switzerland
Reporter: Hansa Tote

Generic business image for news article
Image: MarinadeArt/stock.adobe.com
The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has collaborated with IOTA Foundation to explore how standardised organisational digital identity can enable instant, verifiable, on-chain trust for businesses across global supply chains.

IOTA is a distributed ledger infrastructure, designed to support scalable digital trust applications, including smart contracts, decentralised identity standards, and a sustainable, incentive-based architecture.

The collaboration will focus on enabling the digitisation of trusted global trade by increasing interoperability and inclusion.

Specifically, it will explore how the capabilities of the legal entity identifier (LEI) and verifiable LEI (vLEI) — which provide a globally interoperable, standardised identity for any organisation participating in a trade transaction — can be used to enhance trust, transparency, and data integrity within the IOTA and the Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN) infrastructure.

TWIN is a decentralised trade infrastructure built on IOTA that enables real-time, verifiable data sharing across borders.

Commenting on the collaboration, Alexandre Kech, CEO at GLEIF, says: “GLEIF and the IOTA Foundation share a common belief that organisational identity and verification is the key to making global trade more efficient, transparent, and inclusive — and that this can best be realised through decentralised, open-source infrastructures.

“By examining the potential to connect complementary ecosystems and combine our experience and expertise in the development and application of verifiable credentials, this collaboration marks an important step towards the digitalisation of global trade."

Initial proof-of-concept integrations will investigate how organisations can establish their digital identity in either of the LEI or IOTA ecosystems, and reuse it across both to create instant, on-chain trust for businesses participating in global supply chains.

According to GLEIF, this approach aims to promote the adoption of global standards to ease compliance, reduce friction, and increase accessibility.

Key real-world applications include simplifying complex and fragmented supply chains, enabling cross-border payments, and supporting universal access to trade finance.

Dominik Schiener, co-founder and chairman of the IOTA Foundation, adds: “By integrating the LEI and vLEI into the TWIN infrastructure, we can deliver verifiable organisational identities directly into supply chain processes.

“This will help streamline compliance, reduce friction, and unlock new opportunities for businesses of all sizes to participate in global commerce.â€

To support the collaboration, GLEIF and the IOTA Foundation have officially entered into a dedicated Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).
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