IOTA announced on May 19, 2026, that Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria are the first countries to implement ADAPT, the Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade initiative. The announcement was published in IOTA’s official blog post, “Kenya, Morocco, and Nigeria Lead First ADAPT Implementations”, with a related press release issued the same day from Accra, Ghana. ADAPT was initially launched on November 17, 2025, through IOTA’s earlier official blog post, “ADAPT: Building Africa’s Digital Trade Future”.
Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria begin ADAPT implementation
ADAPT is led by the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat and developed with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the World Economic Forum and the IOTA Foundation. IOTA said the initiative is designed to connect digital identity, cross-border data exchange and interoperable payments into shared digital public infrastructure for African trade. The May 19 announcement says the three pilot countries were selected through a process assessing political commitment, regulatory readiness, digital infrastructure maturity and private-sector engagement.
The implementation details are described at a regional pilot level, not with separate technical milestones for each country. According to the official IOTA post and press release, work now begins across Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria on ADAPT Country Implementation Forums, integration of digital identity systems and payment rails, alignment with continental interoperability standards, live cross-border data exchange, digitised trade documentation at source and testing of regulatory frameworks for digital currencies, including stablecoins. The material does not specify which component is already deployed in each individual country.
Trade bottlenecks and implementation scope
IOTA frames ADAPT as a response to fragmented regulatory systems, limited cross-border data sharing, slow and costly payments, paper-based trade documentation and weak access to trade finance. The $100 billion annual trade finance gap is attributed in IOTA’s May 19 post to the African Trade Report 2025 from Afreximbank, which describes a continent-wide trade finance gap estimated at about US$100 billion annually. This is Afreximbank’s estimate as cited by IOTA, not a new calculation from the Foundation.
Dominik Schiener, co-founder and chair of the IOTA Foundation, said in the May 19 announcement that Africa has an opportunity to move beyond fragmented, paper-based trade systems and build digital trust infrastructure. He said ADAPT is creating a shared interoperable foundation where trade data can be trusted, verified and exchanged securely across borders. That statement represents IOTA’s positioning of the initiative, while the operational facts currently confirmed are the country selection, the start of implementation work and the defined infrastructure areas.
The current status is precise: ADAPT launched on November 17, 2025, and IOTA announced the first implementation countries on May 19, 2026. Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria are now the first pilot jurisdictions moving into implementation, with work focused on forums, identity, payment rails, data exchange, trade-document digitisation and interoperability alignment. The official material does not provide a completion timeline or country-by-country deployment map.