IOTA’s price climbed 4% following the announcement of a groundbreaking partnership between the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) and the IOTA Foundation. The collaboration aims to integrate trusted organizational digital identities into global trade systems, promising greater efficiency, transparency, and interoperability across supply chains.
Building Trust Through Digital Identity
At the core of the initiative is the integration of the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and its verifiable counterpart, the vLEI, into IOTA’s distributed ledger technology. LEIs are already a global standard used by regulators and financial institutions to verify counterparties, while vLEIs take this a step further by embedding credentials directly into digital workflows.
By incorporating these identifiers into the Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN)—a decentralized trade system built on IOTA—the project seeks to enable real-time, verifiable data sharing across customs, ports, banks, and counterparties. This approach could reduce duplication, speed up compliance checks, and streamline trade finance processes.
Alexandre Kech, CEO of GLEIF, emphasized the shared vision behind the initiative:
“GLEIF and the IOTA Foundation share a common belief that organizational identity and verification is the key to making global trade more efficient, transparent, and inclusive – and that this can best be realized through decentralized, open-source infrastructures.”
Why It Matters for Supply Chains
Global trade today is often bogged down by fragmented systems, manual compliance processes, and inconsistent identity verification. By embedding trusted digital identities into decentralized networks, the partnership hopes to resolve many of these pain points.
Potential real-world benefits include:
- Faster customs clearance through instant verification of counterparties.
- Simplified access to trade finance, with banks able to verify legitimacy of applicants.
- Greater transparency in multi-party supply chains.
- Broader participation by small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs), who could access global markets with the same level of trust as large corporations.
Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation, highlighted the impact on inclusivity:
“By integrating the LEI and vLEI into the TWIN infrastructure, we can deliver verifiable organizational 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.”
Next Steps: From Pilots to Global Scale
The collaboration has been formalized through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), with initial proof-of-concept projects already in motion. These pilots will test how organizations can create, verify, and reuse digital identities across both ecosystems.
If successful, GLEIF and IOTA envision a scalable, interoperable trade infrastructure that governments, regulators, and businesses worldwide could adopt. The partnership also aligns with broader digital public infrastructure (DPI) initiatives, which seek to modernize trade through standardized, interoperable technologies.
A Blueprint for the Future of Trade
With its focus on decentralization, identity, and interoperability, the GLEIF–IOTA partnership highlights a broader trend: the convergence of blockchain technology and global standards to reshape commerce. By embedding trust directly into digital systems, the initiative could redefine how trade is conducted, making it more efficient, transparent, and inclusive.
