The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) and the IOTA Foundation – a non-profit organization that develops the IOTA distributed ledger infrastructure – today announce a collaboration to explore how standardized organizational 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, decentralized identity standards, and a sustainable, incentive-based architecture. The IOTA Foundation is also a co-founder of the Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN), a decentralized trade infrastructure built on IOTA that enables real-time, verifiable data sharing across borders.
The collaboration is focused on enabling the digitalization 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, standardized identity for any organization participating in a trade transaction – can be used to enhance trust, transparency, and data integrity within the IOTA and TWIN infrastructure.
Initial proof-of-concept integrations are investigating how organizations can easily establish their digital identity in either of the LEI or IOTA ecosystems, and also reuse it across, both to create instant, on-chain trust for businesses participating in global supply chains.
This approach promises to promote the adoption of global standards to ease compliance, reduce friction, and increase accessibility. Key real-world applications include streamlining checks at ports and customs, simplifying complex and fragmented supply chains, enabling seamless and secure cross-border payments, and supporting universal access to trade finance. It can also be a broader enabler of the development of digital public infrastructures (DPIs).
Alexandre Kech, CEO at GLEIF, comments: "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. 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 digitalization of global trade."
Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation, comments: “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.”
To support the collaboration, GLEIF and the IOTA Foundation have officially entered into a dedicated Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). For more information, please visit the GLEIF website.
