IOTA Distributed Ledger: Beyond Blockchain for Supply Chains

The IOTA Foundation, the organization behind the IOTA open source distributed ledger technology built for the Internet of Things, envisions a future where every single trade item in the global supply chain is tracked and its provenance sourced using distributed ledgers. This vision is already becoming a reality in East Africa, thanks to the collaboration of the IOTA Foundation and TradeMark East Africa (TMEA). These organizations have teamed up to address the challenge of digitizing the export process for Kenya’s flower exporters, airlines and freight forwarders.

TMEA found that for just a single transaction, an African entrepreneur was completing an average of 200 communications, including 96 paper documents. The system developed by the IOTA Foundation and TMEA anchors the key trade documents on the Tangle, a new type of distributed ledger technology different from the traditional blockchain model, and shares them with customs in destination countries. This expedites the export process and makes African companies more competitive globally.

What’s behind this initiative from a technology perspective? That’s what José Manuel Cantera, technical analyst and project Lead at IOTA Foundation, recently shared. From a bird’s-eye view, it involves using:

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