According to Miyaguchi, the move will see every one of the country’s roughly 800,000 citizens hold a verifiable, blockchain-secured identity that they control directly from their devices by 2026.
This further shows how Bhutan’s identity program has evolved rapidly since 2023.
The National Digital Identity was launched initially via a ceremonial registration of His Royal Highness The Gyalsey, a symbolic gesture marking Bhutan’s entry into the digital age. That first version ran on Hyperledger, a permissioned blockchain favored for enterprise pilots.
Yet within a year, government officials decided that migrating to Ethereum would offer the country unmatched decentralization and global security guarantees.
“Ethereum is one of the most decentralised blockchains in the world, making it virtually impervious to disruption. This transition cements both the security and stability of our digital identity.”
Bhutan’s move reflects a global rethink of identity management amid rising identity theft.
Governments have tried to solve this through centralized databases, but these systems are expensive to maintain and notoriously vulnerable to breaches.
Considering this, Bhutan’s answer is to reverse that model by allowing citizens to control their own credentials rather than entrusting them to a central registry.
Miyaguchi revealed that the new NDI will follow a Self-Sovereign Identity architecture built on Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials.
This way, each Bhutan citizen will have an encrypted wallet accessible via smartphone. The wallet would store attestations such as birth date, address, or educational record. This data would be verified through cryptographic proofs.
Bhutan’s blockchain model could bring that down to under $1, depending on transaction fees and validator costs.
Moreover, Bhutan’s adoption follows growing momentum in digital-ID modernization.
The United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund recently completed a blockchain-based verification system for its 70,000 beneficiaries across 190 countries.
Bhutan aims for a similar outcome but on a national scale.
If this initiative proves successful and secures significant adoption, the project could make the country one of the first to demonstrate that public infrastructure can rely on an open, permissionless chain like Ethereum.
Miyaguchi said:
“This milestone marks not only a national achievement but a global step toward a more open and secure digital future for the long term.”
Moreover, the initiative would also be a soft power victory for Ethereum itself, reinforcing its image as the default settlement layer for money and metadata.
At the same time, Bhutan’s experiment could accelerate the tokenization of real-world assets such as land titles, education records, or professional licenses, all of which depend on verifiable identity.
Notably, Ethereum is the dominant blockchain platform for RWA tokenization, controlling 62% of all tokenized assets, including tokenized currencies, commodities, treasuries, and others
