The World Economic Forum (WEF) has thrown its weight behind a blockchain-based tool for digitalising trade documents, joining with five other groups to launch the Twin Foundation.

The non-profit Twin Foundation is responsible for stewarding the Trade Worldwide Information Network (Twin), which uses blockchain-based infrastructure to allow real-time data sharing within supply chains.

The foundation will focus on Twin’s technical and operational design, creating standards and best practices, and ensuring its financial sustainability.

Twin allows exporters to share trade-relevant data, including bills of lading and commercial invoices, as well as specialist information such as sanitary and phytosanitary data for agri-food products.

The network allows users to upload relevant documents and choose who to share their data with whilst retaining ownership of the original.

Jens Munch Lund-Nielsen, head of global trade and supply chains at the Iota Foundation and an advisor to the WEF, said this week that rather than starting with businesses, the development of Twin focused on getting governments on board – starting in Kenya.

“Our first focus was to prove it one place,” he says. “Kenya raised their hand, so we have implemented this with a single-window system with Kenyan revenue authorities and border forces.”

The Twin network taps into the country’s pre-existing single window system for trade, Kenya TradeNet System.

Since documents already have to be uploaded to the platform by exporters to obtain export licences, Lund-Nielsen says, Twin can transfer this export data directly from the single-window system to its own platform, allowing permissioned access to anyone who needs it.

As it is on the blockchain, anyone viewing the data – for instance customs officers in the importing country – can be sure it has not been tampered with, and government backing provides a further layer of security, Lund-Nielsen adds.

This, he says, is key for a trusted digitalisation of trade.

“Until now, we’ve been used to, if you have something digital, you can mass copy it,” he says. “When you can mass copy, you can manipulate. Trust completely goes away from the digital area, so we stay with the paper and the stamps.”

Twin’s next step is to focus on “digital corridors” between nations, says Lund-Nielsen.

The organisation has been working with the UK government for two years developing pilot programmes and is currently in the process of integrating Twin with “the biggest port community system in the UK and the London Port Health Authority”, which will cover 50% of all trade entering the country.

The Twin Foundation is made up of the WEF, blockchain infrastructure company Iota, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation, the Chartered Institute of Export and International Trade, and TradeMark Africa.

It was launched on May 8 at the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Digital Trade Forum in Zambia, following an initial collaboration agreement signed in February 2024.