TradeTrust Newsletter June 2026

How do you think digital and AI-driven shifts will make the daily grind easier for trade professionals, and which manual tasks are you most eager to see become a thing of the past?

"Today, many trade professionals still spend a significant amount of time on mundane, manual tasks, such as chasing documents from clients and stakeholders, re-entering data across multiple systems, and verifying document authenticity. These repetitive processes slow down trade and increase the risk of errors, disputes, and delays.

With digitalisation and AI-driven solutions, I believe that the future of trade operations will become far more efficient, intelligent, and seamless. One manual task I am particularly eager to see become a thing of the past is the repetitive and time-consuming processing of customs declarations. These tasks of extracting information from source documents, collating them, and validating the information to input into the Customs Declaration system can be done by AI more efficiently and accurately. The declarants can then focus on handling exceptions, such as incomplete or wrong documents.

Ultimately, digital trade transformation is about creating a more connected, transparent, and trusted global trading environment for businesses across borders."

In your opinion, how can AI speed up cross-border trade? More importantly, how do we ensure that we can still trust digital trade documents?

AI has the potential to significantly accelerate cross-border trade by improving how trade data and documents are processed, validated, and shared across the supply chain. Today, cross-border trade still involves large volumes of documents with much of these processes remaining fragmented, disjointed and heavily manual.

The Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is a powerful use case on how AI solutions can extract and validate information from Invoices, Bill of Lading, Certificates of Origin, Permits, and Customs Declarations within seconds. AI can also detect inconsistencies, identify potential compliance or fraud risks, assist with HS code classification, and provide predictive insights for cargo clearance and supply chain disruptions. This enables trade professionals and authorities to make faster and more informed decisions.

Trusted digital frameworks such as IMDA’s TradeTrust play an important role in ensuring that digital documents are authentic, tamper-evident, and traceable throughout their lifecycle. Cryptographic verification and blockchain-based trust frameworks can help ensure that trusted digital documents are exchanged securely to significantly reduce processing time, minimise fraud risks, and improve collaboration across the entire trade ecosystem.

I believe the future of cross-border trade lies in the combination of AI and trusted digital ecosystems.

As Asia-Pacific economies accelerate the adoption of paperless trade, building trust across jurisdictions, systems, and stakeholders remains a key hurdle.

Led by The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), with speakers from Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), join us for an insightful session to explore how technologies like AI and blockchain, alongside frameworks such as TradeTrust can enable secure and interoperable digital trade.

Find out more about the role of regional cooperation, with initiatives led by UNESCAP and public-private collaboration in scaling adoption. The session is part of Asia-Pacific Trade Facilitation Forum x Paperless Trade Week 2026, co-organised by the Asian Development Bank and UNESCAP, in collaboration with IMDA.

Sign up for the event (Virtual session available)

The modern bill of lading came into use in medieval times, although its usage can be traced back over 2,000 years ago. But paper bills of lading are fraught with risks - damage, destruction, loss, and fraud, quite apart from the high cost of transporting them aroundthe world.

Electronic Bills of Lading (eBLs) seem like a natural fit for such high value, high risk, and high cost operations. eBLs have in fact been mooted for over 40 years and could, according to McKinsey¹, save $6.5 billion in direct costs and enable $40 billion in trade.

So why do paper Bills of Lading remain dominant?

There are two primary challenges to eBL adoption:

1. the coordination challenge; and

2. the risk management challenge.

¹https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/logistics/our-insights/the-multi-billion-dollar-paper-jam-unlocking-trade-by-digitalizing-documentation

The coordination challenge

eBL systems have historically been closed systems proprietary to each eBL issuer and lacking in interoperability. This is a significant challenge in an industry where a single goods shipment can involve numerous parties.

In practice, to adopt eBLs for a single shipment, an eBL provider needs to persuade an entire chain of parties - shippers, carriers, banks, and consignees - across multiple jurisdictions, legal systems, and organisational types, to unanimously adopt its software system. A shipper might be ready to go digital, but if the freight forwarder, destination port, buyer's bank, and buyer's customs broker are not all on the same platform, you cannot achieve successful eBL adoption for that shipment.

The coordination challenge is difficult to solve because it requires all participants to be operating within the same eBL system silo.

Instead of creating an eBL system, IMDA took a unique approach by creating TradeTrust - a neutral, open source, public, interoperable framework that operates as a digital standard for trade documents.

TradeTrust allows parties to use their own systems and create, exchange, verify, and transfer eBLs under this common standard, using public blockchains as the single source-of-truth. This structure eliminates the need for any party to adopt new systems or trust a single, centralised, third-party eBL system. TradeTrust asks only that participants speak a common language.

TradeTrust is certified as a digital public good, aligns with the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) MLETR principles, and is designed for ease of adoption.

TradeTrust’s focus on acting as a common digital standard, rather than a siloed system, resolves the coordination challenge.

The risk management challenge

Even having resolved the coordination challenge, every public blockchain apart from Stability’s Global Trust Network (GTN) requires organisations to acquire and manage cryptocurrency tokens to transact.

For a logistics company, a trade bank, or a freight forwarder, this is not a technological challenge as technical hurdles and implementation challenges can be overcome. It’s not even a transaction fee challenge as large multinational companies can afford consistently high gas fees if the outcome provides sufficient value.

This is a risk management challenge - regulatory exposure, treasury complexity, compliance overheads, and responsible corporate governance, all at once, before a single eBL is issued.

This is where Stability’s GTN is proving transformative.

The GTN is the only public blockchain in the TradeTrust ecosystem with zero cryptocurrency dependencies. Organisations can integrate with the GTN through a standard API, which allows for fiat costs to be managed through a conventional dashboard. There are no gas fees, no crypto wallets, and no regulatory risk or complexity associated with cryptocurrencies.

Organisations can continue using the same process and workflow that are already familiar to them:

• They can use their existing IT systems, merely integrating with the TradeTrust framework for a common digital standard.

• They can submit their IT systems to the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Digital Standards Initiative (DSI) Reliability Assessment to be accepted for Protection and Indemnity (P&I) insurance, with the same P&I insurers they already use for paper documents.

• They can use their usual trade financing providers.

In other words, no changes are needed except integration with the TradeTrust framework and undergoing the Reliability Assessment - a simple, accessible, low-cost, and low-friction approach to adopting eBLs.

From a blockchain infrastructure perspective, using the GTN ensures that the blockchain's permanence, immutability, and public verifiability remain fully intact, but enterprises no longer need to interact with it as a financial instrument just so they can use it as infrastructure.

Stability’s GTN solves the risk management challenge for organisations.

GTN brings TradeTrust to life

TradeTrust was launched in 2019. Stability was the last blockchain network to join the TradeTrust ecosystem as an approved network partner in 2024. What has Stability’s impact been on real-world TradeTrust adoption in this brief period?

To determine this, IMDA and Stability examined data from mainnet deployments of TradeTrust documents and registries - i.e. live production environments used for real trade documents and actual commercial transactions. We excluded testnets, which are often stress-tested with high transaction volumes for testing purposes but do not reflect actual real-world adoption.

This is what we found on mainnet deployments:

• Over the past 18 months, TradeTrust document issuance has more than doubled.

• In the past 12 months, the GTN has issued 54.4% of all documents ever issued under the TradeTrust framework - more than four times the combined volume of all the other (crypto-blockchain) networks, and in less than half the time they’ve been on TradeTrust.

Registry growth tells the same story:

• In the past 12 months, 60% of all new mainnet token registries deployed across the entire TradeTrust ecosystem were on the GTN. Each registry represents an organisation actively building production infrastructure using the TradeTrust framework and choosing the GTN to anchor their trade documentation for real-world use.

• In the past 12 months, the GTN deployed 75% more new registries than the next most active network in the same period.

The message is clear - the TradeTrust framework is a standard enterprises are now building on, not just evaluating. And Stability’s GTN unlocks this growth by removing all cryptocurrency considerations and solving the risk management challenge for enterprises.

What this means for global trade

The question is no longer whether digital trade documents are viable or scalable.

Regulatory frameworks are aligning towards MLETR adoption, making eBLs more viable every day. International digital standards such as the TradeTrust framework and ICC DSI Reliability Assessment Framework provide a lingua franca for multi-party reliance and interoperability. Stability’s GTN makes the supporting infrastructure publicly verifiable, immutable, zero-trust, and frictionless.

MLETR adoption from Stage 0 (no adoption) to Stage 8 (entry into force). Source: https://www.digitalizetrade.org/mletr

With document issuance more than doubling since Stability’s GTN joined the TradeTrust ecosystem, and with the majority of that growth concentrated on the only cryptoless network available, the adoption curve is not theoretical - it is happening in live production environments with real trade documents.

The slow adoption of eBLs was never about technology. It was about coordination and risk management. TradeTrust solved the coordination problem by creating a common standard. Stability’s GTN solved the risk problem by removing cryptocurrencies entirely from the equation.

Together, IMDA and Stability are transforming one of global trade's oldest documents into a trusted digital asset, enabling a faster, more secure, and more connected future for international trade.

Read the full article

The successful integration between ZenithBlox Inc. and My Blockchain Infrastructure Sdn. Bhd. (MBISB), Malaysia’s national blockchain initiative, establishes a unified, programmable execution layer for digital trade across the Malaysia-Singapore corridor and ASEAN, enabling workflows at sovereign scale.

By combining national blockchain infrastructure with pre-execution compliance governance, the platform goes beyond document digitisation towards automated, policy-enforced execution. Key capabilities include:

• Real-time execution of electronic Bills of Lading (eBLs), legally anchored via TradeTrust

• Automated customs pre-validation, with compliance evaluated before settlement

• Policy-controlled cross-border settlement, with deterministic enforcement across institutional and sovereign rails

Together, these capabilities help reduce friction, improve efficiency, and support trusted digital trade at scale. Following the completion of the technical integration, the operationalisation phase will begin with priority use cases such as TradeTrust-aligned eBL tokenisation, automated customs reporting, and regulated stablecoin settlement corridors.

The initiative marks a significant step towards building a more connected, compliant, and digitally enabled trade ecosystem across the region.

Read the full article

The Hashgraph Group and Teleport are partnering to develop a Digital Customs Documentation System to improve cross-border eCommerce trade across Southeast Asia.

Designed to digitalise and manage the full lifecycle of customs documentation, the System is built on three core capabilities: Hedera’s distributed ledger technology to create immutable shipment records; the TradeTrust framework to support legally recognised digital trade documents; and AI-assisted HS code validation to improve classification accuracy. It will also use TradeTrust to ensure the legal validity of electronic trade documents.

The initiative aims to address eCommerce shipment challenges caused by complex, multi-party processes, enable paperless processes, and strengthen customs risk assessment while reducing manual intervention and clearance times.

The proof of concept is scheduled for completion in the first half of 2027, with plans to onboard merchants and ecosystem partners.

Read the full article

In 2023, one of China’s largest agri-food companies, COFCO Industrial Foods, successfully completed its first trial using an electronic Bill of Lading (eBL) for a shipment of goods to Singapore. The trial demonstrated that digital documents can be exchanged securely and verified across all parties to reduce transfer times and increase efficiency. Followingthis success, COFCO adopted paperless workflows through AEOTradeChain, supportedby TradeTrust.

TradeTrust addresses two key barriers to digital trade adoption: interoperability and legal enforceability. Often described as an “Internet of trade documents,” TradeTrust allows electronic documents to be securely exchanged, verified, and transferred across different platforms, while relying on blockchain and cryptographic verification to decentralise the handling of eBLs.

This approach has since gained traction, with AEOTrade onboarding multiple companies and contributing to a growing global ecosystem of partners. As adoption grows, frameworks like TradeTrust are critical infrastructure for enabling trusted, efficient, and scalable digital trade worldwide.

Read the feature by Business Times

Over the past decade, multiple eBL platforms have emerged, yet adoption remains uneven due to a fragmented ecosystem where platforms operate in isolation.

Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority offers a solution to these challenges by enabling seamless interoperability between platforms through TradeTrust. As an open-source framework, TradeTrust doesn’t replace existing systems. Instead, it creates a common layer that enables electronic documents to be securely exchanged and authenticated across platforms.

Successful real-world implementations of interoperable digital trade documents demonstrate how eBLs can be exchanged seamlessly across platforms. These projects also proved real-world benefits such as reducing title transfer time, enhancing security, lowering costs, and decreasing errors by up to 93%.

The newly launched TradeTrust Readiness Programme will help accelerate adoption of TradeTrust by supporting carriers and platform providers in piloting interoperable eBL transactions.

Read the feature by Tradewinds

Congratulations to the TradeTrust team on receiving the Distinguished Team Award, a well-deserved recognition of their efforts in breaking trade barriers and advancing digital trade interoperability. Thank you to everyone in the ecosystem whose support and commitment have been key to driving this success and shaping the future of digital trade.