Overview

• Government agencies say the Ethereum integration is live, with a launch event in Thimphu attended by Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay, Crown Prince Jigme Namgyel Wangchuck, Vitalik Buterin, and Ethereum Foundation President Aya Miyaguchi.
• The system anchors cryptographic hashes and decentralized identifiers on Ethereum while keeping sensitive information off-chain to support privacy-preserving verification.
• Citizens are set to receive portable credentials that can prove attributes such as age, residency, or citizenship without querying centralized databases.
• Observers welcome the interoperable design yet warn that placing national credentials on a public ledger creates permanence that could enable tracing if safeguards fail.
• Bhutan’s identity shift follows pilots on Hyperledger Indy and Polygon and aligns with broader state crypto efforts including Bitcoin mining and tourism payments via Binance Pay, with public estimates of its Bitcoin reserves remaining inconsistent across outlets.