IOTA has been cooperating with the trade organization Trademark Africa in Africa since 2020. It is now concluding its first contracts with authorities to simplify cross-border trade.
When the IOTA Foundation announced the registration of a branch in Abu Dhabi around three weeks ago, one of the associated goals was to establish a stronger presence in Africa. IOTA has had a strategic partnership with the trade organization Trademark Africa there since 2020, which seems to be slowly bearing fruit. In a recent blog post, IOTA reports that Trademark Africa is now concluding contracts with hygiene authorities to speed up customs clearance on international trade routes.
The project is called the Trade Logistic Information Pipeline (TLIP), which is a database. TLIP is based on IOTA technology and enables documents to be entered and retrieved by authorities. The TLIP website explains that a consignment of goods from Kenya to the Netherlands, for example, requires more than 200 exchanges of information. Instead of processing these on paper, TLIP is intended to save time and money as a digital application. They proudly point to the UK border authorities, which have selected TLIP for a pilot project to organize trade routes more efficiently.
IOTA is not the only cryptocurrency that Africa classifies as a region where the benefits of blockchain solutions can be demonstrated. Cardano (ADA) in particular, with founder Charles Hoskinson, is heavily involved in Africa in the areas of education, microcredit and mobile communications. From a distance, however, it is very difficult to assess the extent to which pilot projects will become widely accepted use cases. In TLIP, IOTA is not (yet) planned as a means of payment; instead, the Tanglenet serves solely to document and network the companies and authorities involved in a trade route. When exporting plants and flowers to Europe, which is typical for Africa, extensive documentation requirements must be observed in order to prevent the introduction of diseases.
Conclusion: IOTA in Africa – the prospects are there
In the summer of 2022, we graphically illustrated why many experts consider the African continent to be “crypto-suitable”. This is basically still the case and IOTA can now also count on support from the United Arab Emirates. On the other hand, cooperation projects of the IOTA Foundation have often shown that there is a gap between PR information and reality. The biggest challenge for IOTA remains the transformation to a decentralized Tanglenet 2.0 announced for 2024. Investors should still not underestimate the IOTA inflation hammer, which is making performance much more difficult.
Leave a Reply