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EGWG 2025-04-03: Stephan Wolf, Verifiable Trade Foundation

By May 12, 2025Blog
Bringing zero-trust to trade and supply-chain - Stefan Wolf

This document and podcast were generated by Google’s NotebookLM. 

The Trust over IP (ToIP) Ecosystem & Governance Working Group held a meeting on April 3rd, 2025, featuring a presentation by Stefan Wolf, Chair of the Board of the Verifiable.Trade Foundation, which introduced the proposal for the International Secure Trade Transfer Protocol (ISTTP). The presentation focused on empowering trust in global trade by bringing a zero-trust architecture to trade and supply chains.

Key Highlights of the Presentation:

  • Stefan Wolf outlined the challenges of current trade processes, including the limitations of paper-based systems and the fragmentation and complexity of existing digital solutions.
  • He introduced the Verifiable.Trade Foundation, a Swiss not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing an open-source implementation of the ISTTP specification with no IP or copyright restrictions and free of fees.
  • The core of the ISTTP solution involves an identity-centric and peer-to-peer connectivity model facilitated by Trade Data Gateways (TDGs) that bridge legacy systems and communicate using verifiable credentials.
  • ISTTP aims to enable authentic data exchange between trading partners, service providers, and government bodies through a mesh network of TDGs, offering the vision of “connect once, connect everywhere“.
  • The protocol leverages verifiable credentials to represent organizational identities, employees, and assets, ensuring verifiable and transitive trust at scale.
  • ISTTP seeks to address the challenge of digital ownership and control of trade documents through chainless tokenization.
  • The foundation is currently focused on securing funding and developing technical specifications, with software development planned for 2026 and a first beta version expected in 2027.
  • The initiative is an open invitation for industry participation in developing and adopting ISTTP.

In summary, the ToIP event provided a platform for the launch of the Verifiable.Trade Foundation and the introduction of the ISTTP, a promising protocol for secure and decentralized global trade. A subsequent discussion explored key aspects of the initiative, and there was an expressed interest in leveraging podcasting as a medium to further disseminate information about this work.

For more details, including the meeting transcript, please see our wiki 2025-04-03 Stephan Wolf – Home – Confluence.

 
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