The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) and the IOTA Foundation have joined forces to investigate how standardised organisational digital identity can foster verifiable on-chain trust for businesses.

IOTA is a distributed ledger infrastructure aimed at supporting scalable digital trust applications, such as smart contracts, decentralised identity standards, and an environmentally sustainable and incentive-based system. The foundation is also one of the founders of the Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN), a decentralised trade infrastructure built on IOTA that facilitates real-time, verifiable data sharing across borders.

Promoting Digitalisation in Global Trade

The partnership between IOTA and GLEIF seeks to facilitate the digitalisation of trustworthy global trade by enhancing inclusion and interoperability. The aim is to explore how features of the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and verifiable LEI (vLEI) can be leveraged to enhance transparency and data integrity within the IOTA and TWIN infrastructure.

The initial integrations focus on enabling organisations to establish their digital identity in either the IOTA or LEI systems more easily, and then reuse it across both platforms to create instant, on-chain trust for businesses engaged in global supply chains. This strategy encourages the adoption of global standards to improve compliance, reduce friction, and optimise accessibility.

Real-world applications include modernising checks at ports and customs, streamlining complex and fragmented supply chains, facilitating secure cross-border payments, supporting universal access to trade finance, and promoting the development of digital public infrastructures (DPIs).

GLEIF and the IOTA Foundation believe that organisational identity and verification are crucial for making global trade more efficient, transparent, and inclusive. This can be achieved through decentralised, open-source infrastructures by measuring the potential to connect complementary ecosystems and combine their expertise in the development and application of verifiable credentials. Integrating LEI and vLEI into the TWIN infrastructure further aids in improving compliance, reducing friction, and unlocking new opportunities for businesses at all levels to participate in global commerce.