A New Paradigm for Global Trade: In this article, Stephan Wolf, Chair of the Board of Trustees at Verifiable.Trade Foundation, outlines how the International Secure Trade Transfer Protocol (ISTTP) introduces a new framework for secure, legally recognized, and interoperable digital trade.
Author: Stephan Wolf, Chair of the Board of Trustees at Verifiable.Trade Foundation
Date: 2025-08-12
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The global trade and supply chain ecosystem is undergoing a profound transformation. Each day, billions of documents are exchanged across industries and borders, yet much of this communication still relies on outdated formats such as paper and PDF. These formats lack the interoperability, security, and legal certainty needed in today’s complex and fast-moving trade environment.
The Verifiable.Trade Foundation, a Swiss non-profit organization, is responding to this challenge with a bold vision: to enable trust at scale through open, standards and protocols, creating verifiability of data. The centerpiece of this vision is the International Secure Trade Transfer Protocol (ISTTP), a foundational step toward a more secure, efficient, and inclusive digital trade infrastructure.
ISTTP will bring about data authenticity and pave the way for zero trust architecture in global trade.
Why Trade Still Runs on Paper
Despite significant advances in digital technology, trade transactions continue to rely heavily on paper-based processes. Studies from the ICC Digital Standards Initiative and its KTDDE Working Group highlight the scope of the issue, identifying 36 commonly used document types that collectively contain nearly 200 unique data elements. Paper persists because it ensures direct, peer-to-peer exchanges of sensitive data. In many cases, it is not economical to replace paper with IT platforms and APIs. However, this traditional approach is slow, expensive, and highly susceptible to error and fraud.
The core challenge is not just digitizing documents. It is reimagining trade in terms of structured, secure, and verifiable data exchanges. Digitalizing trade, in the sense of replacing paper, documents and its electronic substitutes like PDFs with structured machine-readable data, will greatly increase the profitability of going digital.
The Problem with Current Digital Trade Systems
Despite growing interest in digitization, many of today’s digital trade solutions fall short of delivering true interoperability and inclusiveness. A core problem lies in the fragmentation of platforms. Most systems are proprietary and operate in closed environments with incompatible data formats, making it difficult - if not impossible - for parties to communicate and transact seamlessly across borders or between platforms. This results in a high degree of platform dependency and vendor lock-in, where businesses must commit to a single solution provider, often at the cost of flexibility, scalability, and long-term innovation.
The impact is particularly severe for small and medium-sized enterprises. Many MSMEs are effectively locked out of digital trade altogether due to a lack of access to affordable infrastructure, global standards, and required digital skills. This exclusion contributes to the persistent and widening global trade finance gap, which the Asian Development Bank (ADB) most recently estimated at over USD 2.5 trillion annually. This gap represents not only missed economic opportunity but also a systemic failure to build equitable and resilient global trade networks. It deprives millions of people of wealth, since they are shut out from participating in, and contributing to, the global economy.
Further compounding the issue are manual processes that dominate even within so-called digital environments. Without mechanisms for authenticating data and verifying counterparties, errors and fraud remain rampant. On top of all this lies legal uncertainty: in many jurisdictions, electronic records are still not fully recognized under commercial law, especially for cross-border and transferable instruments. These legal ambiguities create risk and disincentivize investment in digital transformation.
The result is an ecosystem that is fragmented, exclusionary, inefficient, and vulnerable — a system in urgent need of a new, open, and verifiable foundation for trust.
Introducing ISTTP: An Open Protocol for Verifiable Trade
The International Secure Trade Transfer Protocol (ISTTP) introduces a fundamentally new approach to digital trade - one that is open, verifiable, and designed to support trust at scale. Developed by the Verifiable.Trade Foundation, a Swiss non-profit with no commercial interests, ISTTP is offered as a fully open-source public good. There are no intellectual property claims or licensing barriers. It is freely available for use, adaptation, and integration across sectors and jurisdictions.
At the foundation of ISTTP lies a zero-trust architecture that assumes nothing and verifies everything. Trade payloads are cryptographically sealed to ensure that their content cannot be tampered with and that their origin can be verified. The protocol integrates key management and chained verifiable credentials for auditability, based on emerging global standards like those from W3C and the Trust over IP Foundation.
ISTTP is document-agnostic and data-driven. Instead of replicating legacy document formats in digital form, it provides a secure, standards-based way to structure and exchange trade data itself. At the heart of this architecture lies a critical and often overlooked enabler: Organizational Identity.
Organizational Identity provides the essential link between data, people, legal entities, and systems. It ensures that every action taken within the protocol, whether a document submission, payment approval, or customs declaration, can be cryptographically tied back to an accountable organization and its authorized representatives, that can be verified to be the organization it claims to be. In a decentralized and zero-trust environment, this is foundational. Without strong, interoperable identity mechanisms, no protocol can guarantee authenticity or establish the trust required for critical trade transactions.
ISTTP makes organizational identity a first-class citizen of the protocol. By embedding vLEIs at every transaction layer, it ensures that exchanged data is not only technically valid, but also legally and organizationally attributable. This shifts trust in trade from something assumed to something proven and verifiable at every step. GLEIF’s vLEI ecosystem enables a new level of end-to-end trust between all market participants – from buyers and sellers to logistics providers, banks, and customs authorities.
Real-World Applications: From Friction to Verifiability
ISTTP is not an abstract concept. It is designed for real-world deployment across complex, high-stakes trade and supply chain environments. Its utility emerges most clearly in scenarios where multiple parties must exchange data with legal effect, across organizational boundaries, and often under severe time pressure.
In shipping, for example, ISTTP enables “data containers” to serve as secure digital counterparts to physical containers. Exporters, logistics providers, customs authorities, and shipping lines can each add signed and time-stamped payloads to a shared, verifiable data stream, without exposing sensitive business data to unintended parties. The result is real-time transparency and legally meaningful traceability, without central data aggregation or proprietary platforms.
In air cargo, the protocol supports the creation and exchange of multi-party-signed air waybills (AWBs), offering cryptographically provable records that include declarations, authorizations, and timestamps. These enhanced AWBs are not just digital copies of paper. They are tamper-evident instruments, linked to verified identities of the issuing and approving organizations. This enhances not only regulatory compliance, but also operational efficiency and accountability throughout air cargo chains. Furthermore, these AWBs are available in real-time to all involved parties.
In trade finance, ISTTP allows verifiable exporters and importers to present signed, authentic digital evidence of shipment, delivery, and customs clearance, enabling financial institutions to assess and settle transactions with greater confidence. Instead of relying on scanned documents and manual reconciliation, banks and insurers can use verifiable records to automate compliance checks, and L/C presentations to unlock working capital, and reduce fraud risk.
In customs and single window environments, ISTTP serves as a secure and interoperable channel for submitting and verifying trade-related data across border agencies. It allows economic operators to send digitally signed declarations, permits, and certificates that are verifiable by customs authorities in real time, and without duplicating submissions across fragmented systems. By anchoring submissions in a common, trust-based protocol, ISTTP can significantly reduce processing times, eliminate document redundancy, and improve coordination between customs, port operators, and trade ministries. This directly supports international goals for trade facilitation and aligns with the WTO’s push for streamlined cross-border procedures.
These examples demonstrate the core strength of ISTTP: it provides a unified protocol for the exchange of signed, structured, and verifiable data across domains. It doesn’t require parties to use the same platform or software, nor does it centralize sensitive data. Instead, it brings trust directly into the data layer—allowing trade to be faster, safer, and truly interoperable.
Working With, Not Against Existing Systems
A key strength of ISTTP is its compatibility with existing infrastructure. Rather than requiring organizations to abandon their current systems, ISTTP introduces adapters and interfaces that allow legacy platforms to participate in secure, verifiable data exchanges. The protocol’s data structures are designed to align with existing message formats and developing standards, making integration seamless. This approach supports the creation of trust networks that include businesses, governments, and institutions, enhancing collaboration and transparency without disrupting ongoing operations.
A Global Standard in the Making
ISTTP aligns closely with the digital trade agenda of the ICC DSI and supports the implementation of international legal frameworks such as the Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (ML-ETR) and the Model Law on the Use and Cross-¬border Recognition of Identity Management and Trust Services (ML-IT). It lays the groundwork for a future digital trade ecosystem that is open, inclusive, and legally recognized. The vision is that industry goes beyond a protocol and toward a living digital guide that evolves alongside the community that adopts it.
Trust is becoming the most valuable currency in global trade. ISTTP provides the tools to make that trust tangible, verifiable, and universally accessible. The Verifiable.Trade Foundation invites regulators, technology providers, trade enablers, and businesses of all sizes to join this collaborative journey. Together, we can transition from a world of paper-based processes to one of digital confidence — secure, interoperable, and ready for the future.
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Stephan Wolf is Chair of the Board at the Verifiable.Trade Foundation, a Swiss not-for-profit organization. He was the CEO of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) (2014 - 2024). Since March 2024, he has led the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC)’s Industry Advisory Board (IAB) of the Digital Standards Initiative, the global platform for digital trade standards alignment, adoption, and engagement. Before he was appointed as Chair, he had been serving as Vice-Chair of the IAB since 2023. In the same year, he was elected to the Board of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Germany.
Between January 2017 and June 2020, Mr. Wolf was Co-convener of the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee 68 FinTech Technical Advisory Group (ISO TC 68 FinTech TAG). In January 2017, Mr. Wolf was named one of the Top 100 Leaders in Identity by One World Identity. He has extensive experience in establishing data operations and global implementation strategies. He has led the advancement of key business and product development strategies throughout his career. Mr. Wolf co-founded IS Innovative Software GmbH in 1989 and served first as its managing director. He was later named spokesman of the executive board of its successor, IS.Teledata AG. This company ultimately became part of Interactive Data Corporation, where Mr. Wolf held the role of CTO. Mr. Wolf holds a university degree in business administration from J. W. Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.
