Bringing Trusted Digital Identities to Global Trade
IOTA Foundation to Collaborate with GLEIF
TL;DR:
The IOTA Foundation has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) to explore collaboration on trusted digital identities for businesses. The partnership will investigate how combining GLEIF capabilities with IOTA tools, such as the Identity Framework and platforms like TWIN, can be utilized to create verifiable, on-chain trust for business interactions and trade networks.
Every business, whether a small local supplier or a multinational corporation, faces the challenge of trusting the legitimacy of its partners. They must verify each counterparty manually, wade through inconsistent, disconnected registries, and struggle to access trade finance because trust is uncertain. Every delay, error, or missing piece of information increases risk, slows processes, and adds cost.
This is the challenge that the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) addresses. Established by the G20’s Financial Stability Board following the 2008 financial crisis, GLEIF is a non-profit global business registry that provides businesses with a Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), a globally recognized 20-digit identifying code, and a verifiable LEI (vLEI), the secure digital counterpart of a conventional LEI. By anchoring entities to its database of trustworthy identities, GLEIF enables trust, transparency, and automation in financial systems.
The IOTA Foundation has now signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with GLEIF to explore collaboration. Through this partnership, IOTA and GLEIF aim to bring the power of verified identities on-chain, applying it to cross-border trade, supply chains, and trade finance.
Leveraging The Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN), the platform for digital trade collaboration co-founded by the IOTA Foundation, businesses can verify counterparties, streamline interactions, and reduce friction in international trade processes. By combining GLEIF’s expertise in trusted digital identities with TWIN’s adoption in supply chains, the collaboration could help companies access financing more easily, especially in higher-risk regions.
How this Partnership Could Work
The teams are jointly exploring proof-of-concept integrations to make it easy for organizations to establish their digital identity in either the IOTA or GLEIF ecosystem and reuse it in both.
For example, linking an IOTA Identity with a GLEIF vLEI and integrating it with TWIN Nodes would create instant on-chain trust for businesses across global supply chains – for example, using cryptographic proofs for deep verification in high-trust Know Your Business checks.
GLEIF also provides API-based services that provide structured data around an organisation. This can speed up onboarding and registration by minimising re-keying for TWIN, streamlining workflows, and reducing friction in trade processes.
What does this mean for a business in the UK, Kenya, or the US? It is about simplicity and access: easier entry into new markets, better access to finance, and automated collaboration with partners. A company with a vLEI could immediately onboard to TWIN, bringing its data and trust credentials into the TWIN ecosystem – and vice versa. As both ecosystems grow and specialize, this partnership ensures that businesses can benefit from the strengths of both worlds immediately.
This MoU represents an important step toward a more reliable, transparent, and efficient global trade ecosystem.
According to Jens Munch Lund-Nielsen, Head of Global Trade & Supply Chains at IOTA Foundation, “As we continuously strive to ensure standardization and interoperability of digital trade services, this partnership with GLEIF is a powerful alignment of teams, knowledge, and products that will benefit both of our ecosystems of users and make it easier to adopt digital solutions across business operations.”
Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation, said: “Blockchain is only valuable when it solves real-world problems. At IOTA, we’re committed to real-world assets and global trade, and this partnership with GLEIF brings trusted digital identities into supply chains to create real economic opportunity.”
Stay tuned for updates as our proof-of-concept with GLEIF develops. In the meantime, learn more about IOTA’s work on trusted digital identities at iota.org/products/identity and collaboration with TWIN on global trade at iota.org/learn/showcases/twin.