The launch of a pan-African digital platform was announced. It’ll unify identification, on-chain data, and payments into a single infrastructure and is expected to double the volume of intra-African trade by 2035.
IOTA, the World Economic Forum, and the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) announced the launch of the ADAPT (AfCFTA Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade Initiative) infrastructure project, which will be implemented under the leadership of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat.
The initiative aims to digitize key trade processes across the continent. The platform is expected to provide unified standards for digital identification, streamlined data exchange, and lower cross-border payment costs, unlocking an additional $70 billion of annual trade potential for Africa.
Africa, home to 1.5 billion people and with a combined GDP exceeding $3 trillion, remains the largest free trade area in the world. Yet intra-continental trade accounts for only 17%, compared to more than 60% in Europe and Asia. The main barriers include paper-based documentation, lengthy customs processing, a lack of reliable digital identifiers, and expensive international payments, with fees reaching 6–9%, costing local economies about $25 billion annually.
ADAPT is designed to eliminate these obstacles through three core components of a unified digital infrastructure:
- Digital identification based on decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials, compatible with national systems in Kenya and Nigeria.
- End-to-end data exchange using smart contracts, IoT cargo monitoring, and AI verification, which will reduce border-crossing times from 14 days to under 3.
- A financial layer combining mobile wallets, banking systems, stablecoins including USDT, and digital currencies, bringing payment costs below 3%.
Full implementation is expected to connect all African countries to a unified digital trade platform by 2035, reduce costs, and generate $23.6 billion in annual economic benefits. Powered by the IOTA blockchain, the platform will ensure immutability and transparency of all trade documents and create conditions for tokenizing commodities and goods, improving business access to financing.
The first ADAPT pilot projects will take place in 2025–2026 in three countries, including Kenya and Ghana. Expansion and regulatory development will begin in 2026, with full-scale rollout planned for 2027–2035.
2025 saw the launch of several pan-African initiatives aimed at optimizing cross-border payments. For example, the joint project by Thunes and Ecobank, and the Flutterwave payment network, but these only addressed financial-flow-related issues.
