Bhutan migrates its national ID system to Ethereum

The South Asian federation of Bhutan is migrating its self-sovereign ID strategy to Ethereum from Polygon, allowing its astir 800,000 residents to verify their identities and entree authorities services.

The integration with Ethereum has been completed, portion the migration of each nonmigratory credentials is expected to decorativeness by the archetypal 4th of 2026, according to Ethereum Foundation President Aya Miyaguchi, who joined Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin astatine the motorboat ceremonial with Bhutan’s Prime Minister, Tshering Tobgay, and Crown Prince, Jigme Namgyel Wangchuk.

Source: Aya Miyaguchi

“It’s profoundly inspiring to spot a federation perpetrate to empowering its citizens with self-sovereign identity,” Miyaguchi posted to X connected Monday, adding that the Ethereum integration was a world-first. 

“This milestone marks not lone a nationalist accomplishment but a planetary measurement toward a much unfastened and unafraid integer aboriginal for the agelong term.”

Integrating a blockchain-based solution into a government’s nationalist ID strategy has agelong been touted arsenic a promising crypto usage case, owed to its immutability, transparency, and privateness features, peculiarly erstwhile zero-knowledge proofs are implemented.

Ethereum is Bhutan’s 3rd blockchain nationalist ID solution

Bhutan antecedently ran its national ID system connected Polygon from August 2024 and Hyperledger Indy earlier that. Brazil and Vietnam are among the fewer different countries that person partially integrated blockchain-based self-sovereign individuality solutions to date.

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Source: Timour Kosters

Miyaguchi noted that Bhutan’s National Digital Identity and GovTech teams played a important relation successful the Ethereum integration, arsenic good arsenic different contributors successful the Bhutan crypto community.

Bhutan has been stacking Bitcoin

Bhutan — a state that measures nationalist advancement by Gross National Happiness — has softly go a person successful crypto adoption successful caller years. It is presently the fifth-largest Bitcoin-holding nation-state, having amassed its holdings done mining utilizing renewable vigor astatine its Himalayan hydropower dams.

It presently holds 11,286 Bitcoin worthy $1.31 billion, trailing lone the US, China, the UK, and Ukraine, BitBo’s Bitcoin Treasuries data shows.

Bhutan whitethorn besides beryllium exploring different crypto initiatives, having met with erstwhile Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao successful precocious September — though the details of their discussions were not disclosed.

Pay successful #BNB utilizing @Binance Pay successful Bhutan🇧🇹, bully and easy. 😏 pic.twitter.com/B5p3YolJjJ

— CZ 🔶 BNB (@cz_binance) September 29, 2025

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