Africa is building the world’s first continent-wide digital trade infrastructure, and it’s being deployed on @iota. A few points worth understanding ↓ Global trade is a $33T market, but the infrastructure behind it is still mostly paper-based. Africa lives with the worst version of this problem: slow border processes, duplicated paperwork, document fraud, and billions lost in fees. The result is simple: trade inside Africa is far harder than it should be. The @AfCFTA, together with the World Economic Forum @WEF, the Tony Blair Institute @InstituteGC and the IOTA Foundation, has now launched ADAPT, a unified digital trade layer intended for all 55 African countries. Pilots in Kenya and Rwanda are already running on IOTA's infrastructure. The outcomes from Kenya alone provide a clear signal: • Document validation cut from ~6–7 hours to ~30 minutes • 60–70% fewer manual steps • Exporters saving roughly $400/month in administrative overhead If scaled across the continent, the projections are significant: • Doubling intra-African trade • ~$70B in additional trade value • ~$23.6B in efficiency gains per year • Border clearance times reduced by more than half • Digital payments (including stablecoins) integrated directly into trade flows What makes this unusual is who's building it. 55 governments chose to build critical infrastructure on an open, decentralized protocol. Not a private platform. Not a closed system. For IOTA, this is the largest Web3 adoption deployment ever attempted, spanning an entire continent and 1.5 billion people. The flywheel is straightforward: every trade document, shipment record, and payment gets anchored onchain. Fees burn. Storage deposits lock tokens. Physical assets become tokenizable. Nearly 50% of the supply is already staked. Now you're layering millions of trade transactions on top of that base. Africa also gets to skip legacy systems entirely. Instead of fixing 1970s infrastructure, they're building digital-native rails from scratch. If this works at scale, and the pilots show it does, other regions will follow the same model. Southeast Asia and Latin America face similar infrastructure problems. ADAPT is launching now across member states. More trade volume, more on-chain activity, more token demand tied to actual economic flows. This is what continental-scale blockchain adoption looks like. $IOTA