IOTA Co-Founder Dominik Schiener Highlights Africa Trade Ambitions Behind ADAPT Initiative

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• ADAPT places IOTA’s technology at the heart of Africa’s trade digitization.
• IOTA is gaining practical relevance as its network moves closer to real-world deployment in large-scale public infrastructure.

IOTA Foundation co-founder Dominik Schiener has reiterated a bold vision for reshaping Africa’s trade landscape through Africa’s Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade Initiative (ADAPT). Speaking after the initiative’s recent launch activities in Johannesburg, Schiener pointed to growing momentum among public and private partners, describing ADAPT as a practical response to long-standing structural frictions in cross-border African trade.

Schiener stressed that cooperation with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, and the World Economic Forum reflects a shared objective involve building a neutral, public digital backbone for commerce, digital identity, and payments across the continent. AfCFTA Secretary-General Wamkele Mene framed the initiative as a turning point, stating:

This initiative is the cornerstone of our vision to create an inclusive and integrated continental market. It is Africa’s blueprint for the digitisation and modernisation of trade: a system that replaces fragmentation with integration, friction with trust, and inefficiency with scale.

According to Mene, he further explained that ADAPT directly addresses years of duplicated compliance, disconnected systems, and slow logistics that have weighed on African businesses.

IOTA’s Strategic With ADAPT into African Trade

As reported earlier, IOTA provides the distributed ledger infrastructure underpinning ADAPT’s digital framework. The network is designed to link identity credentials, trade data, and financial rails into a single, shared system, enabling governments, ports, customs authorities, and companies to interact with fewer technical and administrative barriers.

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Beside ADAPT, IOTA has made two recent moves that strengthen its real-world positioning. First, the network expanded interoperability through mainnet integrations with LayerZero and Stargate, enabling cross-chain asset and data transfers with major blockchains and supporting complex trade workflows. Second, institutional custody access has also improved, with BitGo and Zodia Custody adding regulated support for IOTA tokens, easing participation for larger investors and enterprise use cases .

Broader Impact and Outlook of IOTA

According to official projections, ADAPT could double intra-African trade by 2035, unlock more than $70 billion in additional annual trade value, and generate roughly $23.6 billion in yearly economic activity. These gains would significantly reduce the cost and time associated with moving goods across borders while improving transparency and trust among trading partners.

As of now, IOTA is trading at $0.09196, with an increase of 1.47% over the past day, though has a decrease of 29.61% over the past week. See the IOTA price chart below.