IOTA

Neutral blockchain infrastructure for global trade and supply chains, enabling trusted trade through @TWINGlobalOrg.

[IOTA @iota]

A network built for trade has to be fast, verifiable and easy to run.

Our Q3 progress update covers the work on all three this quarter.

🧵

[IOTA @iota]

A bill of lading is both a receipt and proof of ownership of the goods. Whoever holds the original can claim the cargo.

When a shipment is paid by letter of credit, the original typically goes from the shipping line to the exporter, to the exporter's bank, to the buyer's bank, to the buyer, and finally back to the shipping line at the destination port.

Every handoff is a chance for it to be delayed, lost or forged.

On a shared ledger, the record of who holds it looks the same to everyone.

[IOTA @iota]

Sunday read: trade finance comes with a lot of jargon, but most of it comes down to one question: who carries the risk between shipping and payment?

We broke the main options down in plain terms:
https://t.co/0tf8L3sPAj

[IOTA @iota]

Who carries the risk between the moment goods ship and the moment they're paid for?

Here's how it plays out: https://t.co/RtLVoCg39d

[IOTA @iota]

Who carries the risk between the moment goods ship and the moment they're paid for?

Here's how it plays out: https://t.co/RtLVoCg39d

[IOTA @iota]

After the cargo arrives, a buyer can take up to 90 days to pay, per the US ITA.

Add the time to prepare and ship the goods, and an exporter can be out of pocket for months. Different kinds of trade finance can bridge that gap.

Every one of them depends on documents a funder can trust. On a public ledger like IOTA, a funder can check a document's record without going back to whoever issued it.

[IOTA @iota]

Around 70% of document sets presented under a letter of credit are rejected the first time, a figure widely cited in trade finance practice.

A discrepancy can be as small as a date or a name that doesn't match from one document to the next.

Each one means another round of checks before the exporter gets paid.

[kowei.iota @kowei1995]

Had some time today, so I put together a little @iotanames stats dashboard 🤪
A few interesting things I found:
• Nearly 3,000 unique .iota names have been registered, with around 450K @IOTA in recorded revenue. About 83% came from settled auctions.
• Around 88% of names are 5+ characters long.
• There are only 91 three-character names—roughly 3% of all names—but they account for about 35% of recorded revenue. Short names are doing some heavy lifting
• People are already extending their registrations: 172 renewal payments across 171 names, adding a combined 380 years. These were all extensions made before expiry.
You can look up names, explore registration and payment records, and follow the transaction links to verify things on-chain.

https://t.co/eSxt2hFJCq

[IOTA @iota]

Around $2.5 trillion of trade finance requests go unmet every year, according to the Asian Development Bank.
That's roughly 10% of global trade.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for about 90% of businesses and more than 50% of employment worldwide, yet they struggle to get trade finance on reasonable terms.

Many of these businesses have buyers and paperwork in order.
What they lack is a lender willing to serve them.

Banks often ask for collateral a smaller firm doesn’t have, or decide a small deal costs more than it earns.

That starts to change when a trade's records can be checked onchain by anyone relying on them, without starting from scratch each time.

[StakingCabin @stakingcabin]

Under the hood of the L1 that is built to make a difference

👇 👇 👇

[IOTA @iota]

Only 35% of smaller businesses can get trade finance on reasonable terms, against 50% of larger ones, according to DP World's Global Trade Observatory.

When the Asian Development Bank asked banks why they turn trade finance requests down, deals that weren't profitable enough to process were among the answers.

So what would it take to make a $50,000 shipment worth a bank's time?

[IOTA @iota]

Some of the oldest trade paperwork in the world is about 3,800 years old.

Merchants from Ashur, trading tin and textiles in the city of Kanesh in today's Turkey, recorded their shipments, loans and disputes on clay tablets.

The format has moved from clay to paper to PDF.

Checking a record still mostly means trusting whoever wrote it.

[IOTA @iota]

In 1969, DHL started by flying shipping documents from San Francisco to Honolulu, so they would arrive before the ships.

More than 50 years later, the papers that say who owns cargo still mostly travel the same way.

We think proof of ownership belongs on a ledger anyone can check.

[Luganodes @luganodes]

1/
The upcoming @iota v1.34 release stops charging gas for one class of broken transaction.

It catches them at signing, before they reach execution. Here's the change, plus two more pieces of IOTA tech we're watching 🧵👇

[IOTA @iota]

A buyer usually pays only once the goods have arrived as agreed.

Before it does, it checks that what arrived matches the order, in the quantity and condition the contract set.

If the shipping records disagree, payment waits while both sides work out whose version is right.

The exporter's cash is tied up in that argument until they do.

[IOTA @iota]

A promise to pay can be sold.

A bill of exchange orders the buyer to pay a set amount on a set date. Once the buyer accepts it, the exporter can sell it to a bank for cash today, at a discount.

The bank is buying the buyer's promise, so it needs to know whether the promise is genuine and who made it.

The less of that it can check, the deeper the discount.

[IOTA @iota]

Security remains a key priority for IOTA.

Our bug bounty program is now live on @sherlockdefi, inviting everyone to help identify vulnerabilities and strengthen the network.

Check out the details below.

[Sherlock @sherlockdefi]

The @iota bug bounty is now live on Sherlock!

IOTA is a Move-based Layer 1 blockchain, supporting applications across digital identity, tokenization and trade.

The program covers selected source files in IOTA’s monorepo and companion SDK.

Scope and reward details below ↓

[IOTA @iota]

When a buyer pays 90 days after delivery, the supplier is lending to the buyer for three months.

Payment terms of 30, 60 or 90 days are standard in open account trade, according to the US International Trade Administration.

Large buyers tend to ask for the longest terms, and small suppliers are rarely in a position to refuse.

That wait is a large part of why exporters need trade finance at all.

[IOTA @iota]

Across the ecosystem, @incucaioficial went into production on mainnet and Pyth Pro went live on IOTA L1. For trade, the document extraction service of @TWINGlobalOrg now aligns with UN/CEFACT.

Read the full Q3 update 👇 https://t.co/lgSOBiUkea

[IOTA @iota]

A network built for trade has to be fast, verifiable and easy to run.

Our Q3 progress update covers the work on all three this quarter.

🧵

[IOTA @iota]

For developers, the Rust SDK reached its first beta, Move gained view functions, and the IOTA Explorer was rebuilt around network analytics.

https://t.co/PdKiZpNvGj