Category: Digital transformation and emerging tech

NEW YORK — [September 25, 2026] — Circle Foundation, a philanthropic initiative supported by Circle Internet Group, Inc.’s (NYSE: CRCL) 1% equity commitment, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Food Programme (WFP), today announced two initiatives to improve digital payments for development and humanitarian action.

The initiatives will explore how digital payments and improved digital financial infrastructure can help international organizations move resources, deliver support more efficiently and advance financial resilience and inclusion. 

“Around the world, the need for humanitarian aid keeps growing while the resources to meet it are stretched thinner than ever,” said Elisabeth Carpenter, Chief Strategic Engagement Officer, Circle, and Founding Chair, Circle Foundation. “If we can help humanitarian and development institutions move value faster, more transparently, and at lower cost, we can ensure more of every aid dollar actually reaches the people who need it. Circle Foundation’s support for UNDP and WFP is about strengthening the shared infrastructure powering these organizations so that life-saving and life-sustaining aid reaches people in crisis faster, without the delays and costs of outdated systems.”

Enabling UNDP to move from pilots to programme delivery 

Circle Foundation’s grant will enable UNDP to establish and operate the Digital Asset Innovation Pool, a new mechanism designed for the responsible use of digital assets via regulated payment stablecoins in development programmes to accelerate delivery.

The work builds on digital payment solutions piloted through UNDP’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Blockchain Accelerator, a global initiative led by the Alternative Finance Lab that develops and scales practical solutions using blockchain, AI and other emerging technologies to advance the SDGs. The pilots tested digital Cash-for-Work payments in Aleppo, Syria; disbursements designed for low-connectivity conditions in Haiti; a remittance-linked community investment model in Guatemala; and mobile wallets connected to existing cash-agent networks in The Gambia. The Digital Asset Innovation Pool will build on these lessons by helping Country Offices move from individual pilots to regular programme delivery, with structured implementation support, regulatory and operational guidance, beneficiary safeguards, and tools to track delivery time, cost and reach. 

“Getting resources to people should not be the most difficult or expensive part of delivering a programme. The Digital Asset Innovation Pool will support UNDP in using digital payments responsibly to make last-mile programme payments faster, more affordable and easier to access – especially for people underserved by conventional banking. We want to make sure more of every dollar reaches the people and communities it is meant to support,” said Robert Pasicko, Team Lead, UNDP Alternative Finance Lab. 

The Pool is not intended to replace established banking channels. It will provide an additional option for contexts in which conventional payment systems create significant costs, delays or barriers to access.  

Supporting WFP’s shared humanitarian payment infrastructure

A separate grant from Circle Foundation to World Food Program USA will support WFP and the WFP Innovation Accelerator in building the institutional infrastructure needed to deploy and scale regulated, stablecoin-enabled payments.

The funding will support the underlying systems that make stablecoin adoption sustainable: governance and risk frameworks, treasury and reconciliation systems, and compliance tools built to hold up across multiple country operations. It will also fund local fintech and mobile money integration, along with independent, sector-wide research on cost, speed and operational feasibility – giving the broader humanitarian sector its first real benchmarks on stablecoin-enabled payments. 

Over the next three years, WFP will test two to three country corridors connecting WFP payments with local financial providers and markets, generating evidence on efficiency, transparency and resilience for WFP and the wider humanitarian sector.

“Digital payments have the potential to make humanitarian assistance faster, more efficient, and more resilient, while also fostering greater financial inclusion for the people we serve. Circle Foundation’s support enables us to explore regulated stablecoin-enabled payment solutions in real-world contexts and build the evidence, partnerships, and infrastructure needed to scale responsibly,” said Bernhard Kowatsch, Director, WFP Global Accelerator and Ventures. 

The new contributions expand Circle Foundation’s support for digital financial infrastructure across the UN system. In 2021, the Digital Hub of Treasury Solutions (DHoTS) was launched by UNHCR as a shared platform to modernize financial infrastructure across the UN system, bringing together 15 participating organizations, including UNDP and WFP. In January 2026, Circle Foundation announced its first international grant in support of DHoTS to streamline financial transfers, reduce costs and improve transparency. 

About Circle Foundation 

Established by Circle Internet Group in 2025, Circle Foundation is a donor-advised fund managed by Fidelity Charitable. It advances financial resilience and inclusion through strategic grantmaking and systems-level investments. Seeded by Circle’s Pledge 1% equity commitment, the Foundation directs financial resources and expertise toward creating lasting economic impact. 

About the United Nations Development Programme 

UNDP is the leading United Nations organisation fighting to end the injustice of poverty, inequality and climate change. Working with our broad network of experts and partners in 170 countries, we help nations to build integrated, lasting solutions for people and the planet. UNDP Alternative Finance Lab is a UNDP initiative that connects finance, innovation, and emerging technologies to explore, test, and scale new approaches for sustainable development. 

About the World Food Program USA and the WFP Innovation Accelerator 

World Food Program USA, World Food Program USA, a 501(c)(3) organization based in Washington, D.C., proudly supports the mission of the World Food Programme (WFP) by mobilizing American policymakers, businesses and individuals to advance the global movement to end hunger. The WFP Innovation Accelerator was launched by WFP in 2015 to source, implement and scale high-impact innovations. From its base in Munich, Germany, the WFP Innovation Accelerator has grown to become one of the world’s leading social impact startup accelerators. In 2025, the WFP Innovation Accelerator ran 14 programmes addressing a wide range of social impact and sustainability issues. Its portfolio, comprising over 85 innovations and 29 alumni projects, reached 132.5 million individuals across 75 countries and territories. In total, WFP Innovation Accelerator supported ventures have catalysed over USD 383 million in funding since 2015.

New York, Istanbul, Zurich, 25 August — The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the DFINITY Foundation today announced a new partnership to explore the deployment of sovereign cloud infrastructure and decentralized artificial intelligence to support public-purpose digital transformation across governments, civil society organizations, and UNDP initiatives.

Initial activities will span three complementary workstreams in partnership with UNDP Alternative Finance Lab (AltFinLab), a global initiative connecting finance, innovation, and emerging technologies to explore, test, and scale new approaches for sustainable development. They include supporting UNDP Country Offices through the SDG Blockchain Accelerator to pilot sovereign cloud, AI-enabled software development and decentralized AI applications that address specific development and programme challenges; supporting civil society organizations through UNDP’s Future of Work Academy to build their capacity and test their own applications; and working through the Government Blockchain Academy with governments and public institutions to co-design decentralized AI and cloud pilot frameworks tailored to national and local development priorities.

“At UNDP, our focus is on helping countries understand, test, and responsibly adopt emerging technologies in ways that serve people, strengthen public systems, and advance sustainable development,” said Robert Opp, UNDP Chief Digital Officer. Robert Pasicko, who leads UNDP Alternative Finance Lab, added: “Our collaboration with DFINITY gives us an opportunity to explore how decentralized AI and cloud infrastructure can be applied to real development challenges, with appropriate safeguards, governance, and public-purpose outcomes at the center.” 

“AI is changing not only how software is built, but how institutions operate, protect data, and deliver services,” said Dominic Williams, Founder and Chief Scientist of the DFINITY Foundation. “Together with UNDP, we have an opportunity to help governments, public institutions, and civil society organizations explore sovereign cloud infrastructure that is secure, resilient, and designed to keep control in the hands of the institutions and communities it serves. By reducing the installation and maintenance of complex software to something as simple as installing a phone app, it also lets institutions in lower-capacity settings stand up their own sovereign digital services without large technical teams, helping countries leapfrog traditional infrastructure constraints.”

The collaboration will focus on practical, responsible adoption of emerging technologies in development settings, including the use of DFINITY’s Cloud Engines and Caffeine AI platform to help different stakeholders and institutions test, build, and maintain applications within secure, interoperable, and locally governed digital environments.

This would support UNDP’s broader work with governments and partners to help countries navigate digital transformation while strengthening public systems, improving trust, and ensuring that technology adoption remains people-centered. UNDP’s recent work in emerging technologies emphasizes responsible adoption, privacy, safeguards, interoperability, and public-purpose value across areas including payments, identity, climate finance, social protection, and transparent production systems.  

The parties expect the work to generate practical lessons on how sovereign cloud infrastructure and decentralized AI can be responsibly deployed in development contexts, including how public institutions and civil society organizations can build digital tools, protect sensitive data, improve resilience, and strengthen local capacity.

About UNDP​

UNDP is the leading United Nations organization fighting to end the injustice of poverty, inequality, and climate change. Working with its broad network of experts and partners across 170 countries and territories, UNDP helps nations build integrated, lasting solutions for people and the planet.  

About DFINITY

DFINITY is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to researching and developing the Internet Computer, a network that transforms the internet into a public sovereign cloud capable of hosting the next generation of software and services. Since 2016, DFINITY has grown into a leading technology R&D organization, employing computer scientists, cryptographers, and engineers in Zurich and San Francisco.  

The UNDP Alternative Finance Lab (AltFinLab) has launched an open call for the third edition of the SDG Blockchain Accelerator, inviting UNDP Country Offices and other UN entities to submit development challenges linked to active programmes and portfolios by 30 September 2026.

The global initiative helps develop and scale practical solutions powered by blockchain, AI and other emerging technologies to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It connects UN teams facing concrete development challenges with vetted technology partners who can help them explore, develop and implement practical solutions with the potential for development impact.

AltFinLab leads the Accelerator in strategic partnership with the Blockchain for Good Alliance, alongside leading technology partners across the blockchain and AI ecosystems, including the Cardano Foundation, Stellar Development Foundation, Partisia Foundation, DFINITY Foundation, and FLock.io. Together, they bring expertise from across the blockchain and AI ecosystems and connect participating teams with technical guidance, mentorship and wider partner networks.

The 2026 edition welcomes applications from UNDP Country Offices, global teams and other UN entities that have an active programme, institutional backing and a credible pathway to take a solution forward. Applicants do not need prior blockchain or AI expertise, nor are they expected to identify the type of solution needed before applying.

Applicants should start with a concrete delivery challenge within an active programme, clearly identifying who it affects, what needs to change and why it matters. For examples of how UNDP teams have translated programme challenges into practical solutions, explore New Tech, New Partners: Transforming Development in the Digital Era, which features more than 40 solutions developed through the Accelerator.

The third edition will offer two technology tracks: blockchain, and decentralized AI & cloud. Across both tracks, the Accelerator will support development challenges in four key areas such as digital payments, digital identity, traceability and supply chains, and data and privacy.

The new cohort edition builds on the results of the Accelerator’s first two global cohorts. Fifty teams participated, producing 46 implementation-ready solutions. Seventy percent are now embedded within ongoing national and regional programmes, while 12 progressed into piloting in country contexts. These results have informed a more selective model centred on strong programme ownership and a practical pathway towards implementation.

Once UN teams are matched with technology partners, they will then move through a structured acceleration process combining technical mentorship, solution development, implementation planning, business and communications support, post-acceleration support, and access to international technology ecosystems. They will also receive continued guidance on partnerships, procurement and resource mobilization after the programme.

This model helps teams move viable solutions beyond stand-alone technology concepts and integrate them into ongoing programme delivery, strengthening services and contributing to greater transparency, efficiency, inclusion and accountability.

Learn more about the SDG Blockchain Accelerator and apply by September 30, 2026!

Contact

Ben Thomson Coon
SDG Blockchain Accelerator Lead
ben.thompsoncoon@undp.org

Governments around the world are accelerating their digital transformation efforts. As they do, blockchain has gained attention as one of several technologies that can help strengthen public systems, from digital payments and identity to climate finance, supply chains, and public service delivery. Governments are now less focused on proving blockchain can work than on exploring where it can bring the greatest value, integrating it into public systems and sustaining it over time. 

These questions shaped Scaling Blockchain for Public Good, a two-day series of events organized by the UNDP Alternative Finance Lab (AltFinLab) alongside Proof of Talk 2026 in Paris. The programme included the launch of the UNDP Blockchain Advisory Group (BAG), a platform for strategic dialogue between UNDP and leaders from across the blockchain ecosystem; a public dialogue co-organized with the Sciences Po Tech & Global Affairs Innovation Hub on the institutional and policy dimensions of blockchain adoption; and the SDG Blockchain Accelerator Impact Showcase, highlighting implementation-ready blockchain solutions developed through UNDP’s global accelerator. 

From experimentation to implementation​

The discussions reflected a broader shift in how blockchain is being approached. Rather than asking where blockchain can be applied, attention is increasingly turning to how it can help solve concrete public challenges and where it offers a clear advantage over existing approaches. Speakers shared examples from governments and development programmes around the world, including blockchain-verified academic credentials in Dubai and humanitarian payments in fragile contexts. Despite their different contexts, each initiative responded to a clearly defined development challenge rather than starting from the technology and looking for a problem to solve. 

Participants also pointed to a common set of barriers. Governance, regulatory clarity, interoperability, institutional capacity, and public trust increasingly determine whether innovative solutions move beyond pilots and become part of long-term public systems. 

Building government readiness

Moving funds through blockchain-based systems can be relatively straightforward. Ensuring that people can access, use, and benefit from those funds is not. The Sciences Po dialogue highlighted the importance of the “last mile” of public service delivery, where digital identity, payment infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, and local institutions all shape whether innovation reaches the people it is intended to serve. The challenge, participants argued, is often less technological than institutional. 

The conversations also highlighted the importance of institutional continuity. Successful initiatives need to outlast individual projects, funding cycles, and changes in leadership if they are to become sustainable public systems. 

This thinking informed the launch of the Government Blockchain Academy, developed by UNDP in partnership with the Exponential Science Foundation. The Academy will equip government officials with the knowledge, practical skills, and institutional capabilities needed to assess blockchain technologies, identify where they create value, and support their responsible adoption as part of broader digital transformation strategies. 

Collaboration for implementation

Scaling blockchain for public good depends on collaboration across governments, development organizations, academia, and the private sector. 

More than 30 senior representatives from across the blockchain ecosystem gathered for the inaugural meeting of the UNDP Blockchain Advisory Group, creating a new platform for strategic dialogue on the responsible application of blockchain for sustainable development. Beyond providing strategic advice to UNDP, the Group creates space to exchange knowledge, identify emerging opportunities, and strengthen collaboration around shared development priorities. 

Its first discussion focused on digital finance and financial inclusion. Globally, 1.3 billion adults remain without access to formal financial services, and close to one billion lack the digital identity needed to access them. The discussion examined how blockchain-enabled approaches can help address these persistent challenges and what is required to support implementation at scale. Participants emphasized that financial inclusion is not simply about moving money more efficiently. It is about enabling people to participate more fully in the economy by building trusted financial histories, accessing savings and credit, and connecting to formal financial systems. Blockchain can support that transition, but only when it is integrated with existing financial infrastructure and supported by appropriate governance, regulation, and partnerships. 

Showcasing implementation-ready solutions

The SDG Blockchain Accelerator Impact Showcase demonstrated how these ideas are already being put into practice through partnerships between UNDP and technology innovators. The Showcase introduced the SDG Blockchain Accelerator to a wider blockchain audience, presenting UNDP’s challenge-led approach to innovation. Rather than starting with technology and searching for a use case, the Accelerator begins with development challenges identified by UNDP Country Offices and institutional partners, then matches them with technology organizations capable of designing and implementing a solution. This helps ensure that innovation responds to real needs while creating practical pathways towards implementation. 

Among the projects presented, FreedomPay Wallet is working with UNDP The Gambia to strengthen transparent and accountable digital payments, while Plastiks is partnering with UNDP in Armenia, India, El Salvador, and Zambia to create verifiable records of plastic recovery that support circular economy value chains. Other teams showcased solutions focused on programmable funding, supply chain traceability, and digital finance, showcasing how blockchain can strengthen transparency, efficiency, and accountability when embedded within broader public systems rather than deployed as a standalone technology. 

Blockchain for good at scale

“The future of blockchain for development will depend not only on innovation, but on the institutions, partnerships, and public trust needed to apply it responsibly,” said Robert Pasicko, Lead, Alternative Finance Lab (AltFinLab), UNDP Europe and Central Asia. 

Putting blockchain to work for sustainable development requires more than technology. It requires capable institutions, trusted partnerships, and the confidence to adopt new approaches responsibly. Achieving this requires new models of collaboration that bring governments, development institutions, and the blockchain ecosystem into sustained, structured dialogue rather than one-off engagement. 

The CEF x AI Bootcamp, held on 23–25 June under UNDP’s City Experiment Fund (CEF) with the support of the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic, brought together some thirty participants from ten municipalities – from capital cities to small towns, some of them rebuilding through crisis. In the course of three days, cities from Armenia, Kosovo1, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Ukraine worked on exploring where – and whether – AI belongs in their city.  

Their starting points differed widely, but the challenges they brought clustered around a handful of shared themes: energy resilience and resource monitoring; water management; waste collection and recycling; air quality and environmental prediction; making sense of citizen requests and complaints; and planning – from circular economy to sustainable tourism. Several teams are also grappling  with the underlying data challenge: fragmented systems, scattered records, and information that exists but cannot yet be used. 

Why a bootcamp, and why now 

Cities are already encountering AI whether they choose to or not – it is reshaping how services are delivered and decisions are made, while the capacity gap between what the technology demands and what most municipalities have kept widening. Cities that engage early get to shape how AI is adopted: which problems it solves, and which safeguards are built in. 

Yet most AI training for governments stays abstract – a tour of the technology, disconnected from any decision a city actually has to make. CEF takes a different starting point: AI is not a tool to procure but a capability to build. The bootcamp was designed as the pivotal middle step of a longer journey that runs from foundational learning to funded experimentation as part of the new CEF x AI programme. 

How we designed it 

Three design choices shaped the experience. 

Fundamentals moved online, before the event. All participants completed a self-paced AI Foundations course and a set of preparatory canvases in advance. That freed the three days in Podgorica for the only thing that cannot be done remotely:  teams working through the challenges facing their own cities alongside peers and experts in the room. 

A workbook, not a lecture series. The heart of the bootcamp was a single workbook of seven canvases, each producing one concrete output that feeds the next: an ecosystem map, a problem statement, a responsibility check, a feasibility check, peer feedback, entry points, and reflections. By the final afternoon, every city had at least two concrete AI entry points – the substrate of their funding proposal. One instruction was printed into the method itself: “‘AI is not the answer’ is a valid finding.” 

Three days, three questions. Day 1 asked what AI is making possible for cities and why it matters now – inspiration, provocations, and real cases from Bratislava, Montenegro’s national AI strategy and the IEEE’s GenAI for Good work. Day 2 asked what each city’s AI landscape looks like, and which challenge is most worth pursuing. Day 3 focused on implementation: do we have what it takes, and where do we begin? 

Instead of a taxonomy of algorithms, cities worked with four functional pathways, each phrased as a question a public servant can answer: Do you want to understand what is happening in your city (sensemaking intelligence)? How to explore the impact of decisions before committing them (future intelligence)? Improve daily operations (operational augmentation)? How to better understand how different groups experience the city (ecosystem insights and engagement)? 

What we learned 

Problem framing is the hardest and most valuable step. Cities tend to arrive with solutions, rather than problems.  Many of the biggest breakthroughs came from refining the “How might we” statement. Teams were challenged to clearly define who is affected, what needs to change for them, and why it matters – without jumping to a solution or embedding a technology in the question. 

Permission to say no to AI builds trust. Making “AI may not be the answer” an explicitly valid outcome changed the tone of the room. Teams became more candid about fragmented data, missing skills and weak enabling conditions, which is exactly the honesty a credible proposal needs. 

Peers are the real curriculum. One participant named their key takeaway from Day 1 simply as a “feeling of alignment.”  Whether rebuilding through crisis or planning for long-term transformation, small towns and capital cities found themselves asking many of the same questions. Structured peer feedback in country groups helped teams refine those shared challenges into sharper problem statements. 

Responsibility works as a design step, not a lecture. Rather than an ethics session bolted at the end, every team worked through a responsibility canvas while their AI direction was still taking shape – asking who could be harmed or excluded, whose privacy and rights are at stake, and what safeguards would need to be in place. While the cities are still exploring how AI might be applied, it also makes the right moment for cities to reflect on ethics, privacy and rights from the very beginning – where the responsibility becomes part of the design rather than an afterthought.  

Real-time sentiment is a facilitation tool, and occasionally a mirror. The daily Menti meter pulse lets the team adjust pacing and energy between sessions. It also gave participants a place to leave the harder, anonymous questions. A room that steps back from process to ask about purpose is a room that has understood the assignment. 

What happens next 

The bootcamp is a beginning, not an end. Cities are now refining their entry points into proposals along two tracks for CEF x AI Programme. Track 1 – the CEF x AI Demonstrator – will support selected cities with US$200,000 over roughly two years to build and test AI pathways embedded in their ongoing portfolios. Track 2 – the BOOST x GenAI for Good Challenge – will match city-owned use cases with global innovator teams to co-design responsible, open-source GenAI solutions, with cities staying owners of the problem throughout. Selection will take place over the summer; and the activation begins in September 2026. 

The question these ten municipalities are taking home is no longer: “What can AI do?” It is the one that emerged during the bootcamp: Will this actually benefit the citizens of our town?  The fact that teams are asking this before a single line of code is written may be the bootcamp’s most important outcome. 

[1] References to Kosovo shall be understood to be in the context of United Nations Security Council resolution 1244 (1999). 

While information about AI is abundant, space to make sense of what it means in practice is not. That gap between the global AI conversation and where cities in our region actually stand is the focus of the first session of the AI in Development Practice series. Hosted by the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Regional Bureau for Europe and Central Asia, the series aims to create space for practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to work through how AI is reshaping development work. 

Urban governance is one of the places where AI’s effects are most concrete and most uneven, and where the stakes of getting it wrong are hardest to ignore. Two speakers anchored the conversation, each approaching the same problem from a different angle: Gesa Ziemer, Academic Lead at UNITAC and Director of the City Science Lab in Hamburg, and Yoonjin Yoon, Founder and Director of the Urban AI Institute and Chair Professor at KAIST in South Korea. 

Gesa Zeimer: Leveraging existing ecosystems in cities to enable AI and digital transformation

Gesa pointed out that there is a widening gap between how fast urban AI is developing and how ready cities actually are to use it. Data is often outdated, fragmented across authorities, civil society, and private companies, and rarely interoperable enough to feed into an AI system. 

Most cities her team works with lack a centralized data management system altogether, and where one exists, it’s often built on a single proprietary platform leaving the city dependent on that company rather than in control of its own data. 

On where cities should start, her clearest answer was prioritization: connect civil society and government first. Activists, artists, and community groups are doing real work that’s disconnected from government, and government holds laws and strategies disconnected from what’s happening on the ground. 

Her example of an ecosystem approach in practice came from Windhoek, Namibia. The national statistics agency had a solid centralized data platform, but the column for informal settlements was essentially empty, left blank for political reasons. Rather than build a new tool, her team’s actual work focused on relationship-building connecting local NGOs who already held the data, building enough trust to get it included. 

Yoonjin Yoon: How cities could apply AI – what the KAIST Urban AI Lab has been testing in cities

Yoonjin opened with a conceptual distinction that anchored her entire talk:  

The purpose of urban AI is not technology. It is to enable better decisions, improve day-to-day operations and services, strengthen engagement with communities, and help cities achieve more with fewer resources, less budget, less staff. Every city, regardless of wealth or geography, is wrestling with the same three challenges: how people move, how the city responds to external stress, and how it manages growth. AI doesn’t resolve those challenges. It helps leaders see them more clearly, understand them more deeply, and act more confidently. This is what decision support actually means, not automation, not replacing planners or policymakers, but giving them better tools to understand what is actually happening in their city. 

Two Seoul projects illustrated what using AI looks like in practice and what it can reveal unexpectedly. In the first, using daily credit card data across all 422 Seoul neighbourhoods, the team found that 80% of neighbourhoods see retail sales decline on extreme heat days. Commercial centres drawing commuters and visitors saw the sharpest drops simply because those people stopped coming, while residential neighbourhoods serving local daily needs were largely unaffected. Neighbourhoods that looked identical in official statistics functioned completely differently in reality – invisible in aggregate data but made visible through AI. A second Seoul project used an AI agent built on the open-source SUMO traffic simulator to let non-expert city officials test scheduling decisions – such as the best 30-minute window for road maintenance – using plain-language prompts that anyone can understand. 

For cities that find themselves earlier in this journey, her advice was to flip the usual instinct: define the real problem first, rather than starting from what AI can do. She pointed to her institute’s current project near Ho Chi Minh City, where data exists but is scattered, as a close parallel to where many cities in our region are starting from, and noted that a small or imperfect dataset is still worth using, since working with what’s available tends to reveal what the next data investment should be. Asked separately about open datasets, she pointed to satellite imagery as the most universal starting point regardless of income level, alongside anonymized mobile movement data for understanding human dynamics that built-environment data alone can’t capture. 

Both speakers, in different ways, pointed to the same underlying urgency. The window for shaping AI adoption is now. Cities that engage with AI early (even if modestly) can shape how it is introduced: which problems it addresses, whose interests it serves, and what safeguards are built in.  

Putting AI to work in cities: The CEF × AI programme 

The webinar coincides with the launch of the AI Foundations course for municipalities and the launching of CEF x AI, a new programme, part of the City Experiment Fund, focused on helping cities build the capability to work with AI in practice. 

CEF × AI frames AI not as a technology agenda but as a set of functional capabilities cities can put to work. The programme organizes these around four pathways:  

Together, these four pathways reflect a single underlying idea: AI is most useful when it starts from a real municipal problem, not from the technology itself. To support this work, UNDP organized a CEF × AI Bootcamp in Podgorica, Montenegro in June 2026 bringing together municipalities from the region to explore how AI can support their green and digital priorities. Over three days, city teams worked through their own challenges, assessed their readiness for AI, and identified practical opportunities for experimentation and implementation. 

Stay tuned for our next webinar sessions! 

Istanbul, 06 July 2026. The United Nations Development Programme and the Stellar Development Foundation have signed a new agreement that carries their joint work on blockchain-based digital payments into its next phase, moving from a set of proven pilots toward a standing capability that UNDP country offices can draw on as a regular part of how they deliver programmes. Coordinated by the UNDP Alternative Finance Lab (AltFinLab) at the Istanbul Regional Hub, the agreement shifts the focus from testing the technology in specific contexts to putting in place the institutional conditions under which it can be used at scale.

The decision to scale follows sixteen months of joint work, during which the two partners researched the use of digital payments across seventeen countries, consulted UNDP country offices and stakeholders, and implemented live pilots in Haiti, Syria, Kenya, Guatemala, and The Gambia, with two further solutions developed to a working prototype in Colombia and Papua New Guinea. In parallel, the Sustainable Development Goals Blockchain Accelerator, strategically led by UNDP AltFinLab, matched a cohort of payment solutions built on the Stellar network with real UNDP programme challenges, producing a portfolio of graduated solutions with documented pathways to scale within existing country office programmes.

These pilots produced concrete evidence rather than promising projections. In Aleppo, UNDP delivered Cash for Work stipends to beneficiaries digitally and recorded every transaction on-chain, which reduced the estimated cost of distribution from about 10 percent of funds under conventional methods to about two percent, with every participant receiving and cashing out their payment. In Haiti, a pilot built for low connectivity continued to function with a 100 percent success rate, even when the cellular network failed entirely during testing, settling payments almost instantly under the conditions that communities actually face. Across all of the pilots, programmes gained something they had not had before, which is a traceable record of where money went.

Earlier in 2026, UNDP featured part of this work in the report New Tech, New Partners: Transforming Development in the Digital Era, which set out why reliable digital payment infrastructure matters for financial inclusion, for remittances, and for reaching people in fragile and conflict-affected settings that traditional financial systems sometimes fail to reach.

The new agreement turns these results into a capability that does not depend on any single project or funding cycle. Over the coming period the two partners will establish the governance, onboarding, and safeguards that allow UNDP to adopt digital payments responsibly, move validated solutions from the existing pipeline into active use, extend the same infrastructure across different categories of UNDP programming – from humanitarian response to social protection and financial inclusion – and consolidate the evidence and operating guidance that the service needs to continue and grow within the development system. 

Throughout this phase, the Stellar Development Foundation will provide technical advisory support and coordination across the Stellar ecosystem, including expertise on the network and its protocols, and engagement with the solution providers operating within the UNDP pipeline, while UNDP will retain responsibility for delivery and implementation.

Robert Pasicko, UNDP Alternative Finance Lab, said: “We have shown that digital payments can reach the people that conventional systems miss, and in some of the hardest places to operate. The work now is to make that capability ordinary, so that a country office can use it with confidence as part of how it already works, rather than treating each deployment as an experiment.”

Candace Kelly, Chief Legal Officer, Stellar Development Foundation, said: “These pilots showed what open, public blockchain infrastructure can do when it is built around the realities of the last mile. We are proud to continue this work with UNDP and to help turn a set of successful pilots into a durable part of how development and humanitarian finance is delivered.”

The agreement runs through 2027 and will conclude with a consolidated evidence base, a scaling playbook, and a formal handover, so that the capability outlasts the partnership that created it.

About the United Nations Development Programme

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the leading United Nations organization fighting to end the injustice of poverty, inequality, and climate change. Working with our broad network of experts and partners in 170 countries and territories, we help nations to build integrated, lasting solutions for people and planet. Learn more at undp.org or follow at @UNDP.

About UNDP Alternative Finance Lab

UNDP Alternative Finance Lab develops new financial approaches, instruments, and partnerships that expand the resources available for sustainable development. Its work on blockchain based digital payments is part of a wider effort to make development and humanitarian finance faster, more transparent, and more inclusive. The Lab is hosted at the UNDP Istanbul Regional Hub.

About the Stellar Development Foundation

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is a non-profit organization that supports the development and growth of Stellar, an open-source network that connects the world’s financial infrastructure. Founded in 2014, the Foundation helps maintain Stellar’s codebase, supports the technical and business communities building on the network, and serves as a voice to regulators and institutions. The Foundation seeks to create equitable access to the global financial system, using the Stellar network to unlock the world’s economic potential through blockchain technology.

UNDP teams are increasingly being asked to make sense of fast-changing digital systems before the institutional playbook is fully written. As part of this shift, blockchain is entering more practical development conversations, and UNDP’s ability to engage well depends on colleagues who can look beyond the technology and assess the operational and public-interest conditions around it. 

The Virtual Development Assignment Programme (VDAP) offers a structured approach to build this kind of judgement as a UNDP people-development modality. Hosted by the Talent Development Unit under the Office of Human Resources and accessed through Fuel50, VDAP allows colleagues to take on assignments outside their usual office or bureau and contribute to live areas of work to build skills through applied exposure rather than detached training.  

For blockchain, UNDP AltFinLab has been using this modality to bring colleagues closer to active workstreams while drawing on their regional and operational experience. A digital payment system needs liquidity, compliance, reporting and user trust; a credentialing tool needs legal recognition and data protection; a traceability system needs reliable actors across the chain. And through VDAP, AltFinLab brings colleagues into this practical layer, where technical promise is tested against operational reality. 

A pathway into live blockchain work

VDAPs have grown alongside AltFinLab’s portfolio as it moved from building internal learning through the Blockchain Academy, to strengthening exchange through the UN Blockchain Community of Practice, to developing a pipeline of use cases through the SDG Blockchain Accelerator, and now to supporting implementation and scale-up. Participants have entered this pathway through practical assignments that help translate the portfolio into usable knowledge and more grounded programme design with stronger country-office links.  

The same direction is reflected in New Tech, New Partners, which shows how UNDP’s blockchain practice is moving closer to public systems where payments, records, finance, trust and evidence need to work across many actors. 

This is why VDAP is becoming an important channel for strengthening blockchain capacity within UNDP. Participants contribute directly to live work while developing a sharper understanding of how blockchain can be assessed in relation to operations, partnerships, safeguards and country-level delivery. In return, UNDP gains colleagues who can bring knowledge of local systems, institutional constraints and programme realities into portfolio discussions. 

What blockchain-linked VDAP opens

For upcoming cohorts, the strongest argument may be the kind of work alumni were able to enter, and the value of this model is visible through the people who have passed through it. Some worked on learning systems; others moved closer to digital payments and pilots, AI, operations, credentials or regional digital work.  

Earlier VDAP participants helped shape parts of the foundation that AltFinLab’s blockchain work still draws on. Dzenan Buzadzic, Digital Governance and AI Specialist, brought a digital perspective into early mapping and knowledge work, helping review the Tadamon Web3.0 platform and Blockchain Academy content, and developing an opportunity analysis for blockchain-based certification. Jenny Ensi, then Head of Experimentation at UNDP Accelerator Labs, connected her experience in innovation, acceleration and STEM education to early thinking on blockchain education for girls and women in the RBEC region, while also supporting engagement with learning platforms. 

McDonald Nyoni, AI Policy Analyst, brought a strategic and implementation-focused perspective to the VDAP work, helping shape tokenization use cases, explore partnerships, and connect alternative finance with emerging opportunities in artificial intelligence. From UNCDF Tanzania, Country Coordinator Tian Zhang, added a UNCDF perspective to the Academy’s content review and beta testing, which shows us how blockchain learning benefits when it draws on experience beyond one office or function. 

These contributions show how VDAP can turn internal expertise into institutional assets that others can build on.

Applied learning that travelled further

The value also appears in what participants were able to carry into later work. For Ana M. Grijalva, then Innovation and Digital Lead with UNDP Ecuador, VDAP created a route into AltFinLab’s blockchain portfolio that later developed into direct coordination of digital payments work. As Coordinator of Blockchain Digital Payments and Digital Institutional Strengthening, Ana coordinated a global team across three regions to support five blockchain-based digital payment pilots. 

Her work also included developing an engagement strategy with eight government counterparts, helping position blockchain-based payment approaches around financial inclusion and security in government-to-person transfers. Her story shows how VDAP can move colleagues closer to live portfolio work, where country-office experience, cross-regional coordination and government engagement become part of implementation. 

“One of the aspects I appreciated most about the VDAP was how the Innovation Team truly made us feel like part of their team. They fostered a collaborative environment by maintaining a well-structured working routine, actively engaging with us, and transparently sharing ongoing initiatives.” Ana M. Grijalva

Another form of value came through colleagues who connected the assignment to wider digital strategy. Enrique Crespo, Regional Digital Specialist for Latin America and the Caribbean, saw value in connecting blockchain with broader digital transformation and regional digital strategies. For him, working in an environment of AI and blockchain learning opened space to think about how these technologies could inform regional strategies and practical applications. 

Closer to delivery, knowledge and operations

VDAP also helped bring blockchain closer to the systems and operations that make development work possible. Muhammad Hanana, Head of Experimentation in UNDP Syria, brought country-office experience into digital payments work, where the real questions are not limited to the payment rail itself, but include liquidity, regulation, cash-out options, reporting and user trust. Additionally, Sanja Crvenica, a Legal Specialist working with financial institutions at UNDP Montenegro on the development of an EU-ready financial sector, has been involved in knowledge infrastructure work, including repository development, mapping and blockchain reporting, helping turn scattered experience into something the wider system can use.  

Marina Storgaard, Human Resources Associate, brought an operational lens to the VDAP experience. Her reflections connected blockchain learning to internal systems, including smart contracts, HR processes, credential verification and tokenization as possible ways to improve transparency and efficiency inside institutional workflows.

“Participating in this VDAP project has significantly enhanced both my technical and interpersonal skills. I developed stronger project management skills, particularly in collaborating across diverse teams and regions, navigating complex decision-making processes, and ensuring smooth communication.” Marina Storgaard

What links them all is the ability to bring their own professional setting into the assignment, and then carry new questions, contacts and practical judgement back into their work.

Why this matters for Country Offices

For Country Offices, this kind of internal capacity changes the starting point of a blockchain conversation. Instead of receiving a proposal and reacting to the technology, colleagues who have worked through VDAP can help ask the earlier questions: what problem is being solved, who needs to be involved, what risks need to be managed, and whether blockchain is actually the right tool. 

This is the network effect UNDP AltFinLab is trying to build. VDAP alumni can become connectors inside their offices and teams, linking programme needs with the right expertise and keeping blockchain discussions close to delivery. They can also help maintain relationships between Country Offices and the wider UNDP innovation ecosystem, so emerging ideas are assessed with institutional memory, technical support and a clearer view of public value.

Join the next blockchain VDAP!

The fifth cohort arrives at a time when UNDP is engaging more systematically with the blockchain ecosystem, as evidenced by the recent establishment of the Blockchain Advisory Group in Paris, which is exploring the potential of this technology to support public-purpose digital transformation and financial inclusion.   

In light of this, Cohort 5 will adopt a more intentional approach, seeking out colleagues already close to the right ecosystems, countries, functions and thematic areas, and who can help unlock meaningful opportunities for UNDP’s innovation pipeline.  

Participants do not need to arrive as emerging tech experts. What matters is curiosity, judgement, initiative and a close understanding of how development work is designed and delivered. The strongest candidates will be those who can bring practical experience into live workstreams, engage with specialists and partners, and return to their offices with sharper questions about where blockchain and AI belong in development practice.

Cohort 5 at a glance

Opportunity title
Scaling Blockchain & AI for Development – SDG Accelerator, Digital Payments & Government Engagement

Available roles
6 positions across 4 roles

Eligibility
UNDP, UNCDF and UNV colleagues

Application channel
Fuel50 >>> search for the opportunity title and indicate which role you are applying for

Deadline
24 July 2026

Contact
Teodor Petricevic, teodor.petricevic@undp.org

The ninth and closing session of the spring UN Blockchain Talks handed the floor to three private-sector builders working at the edge of AI and blockchain, and asked them a blunt question: what do you actually need from an organization like the UN if AI agents, federated learning, and on-chain accountability are going to work at scale?

The conversation brought together Jiahao Sun, founder and CEO of FLock.io and former Director of AI at the Royal Bank of Canada, Patrick Tobler, co-founder of Masumi Network and creator of NMKR, and Gustav Friis, co-founder of NEARWEEK, with moderation by Ben Thompson Coon of the UNDP Alternative Finance Lab. 

Your AI is only as good as the data it’s allowed to see 

Jiahao Sun opened with the problem federated learning was built to solve. Good models need a lot of data, but in any large organisation, that data sits in silos for good reason. Hospitals, country offices, and banks can’t simply pool everything into one place. 

FLock’s answer is to train models locally and only aggregate the learnings – never the raw data – across a network with no single controlling node, federated learning plus blockchain for open coordination. Is it as efficient as centralised training? Not historically, Sun admitted. But the field has moved to a hybrid model by training a strong foundation model centrally, then fine-tune it on sensitive local data in a federated way getting most of the privacy benefit without the old efficiency penalty. 

His ask for UNDP heading into Cohort 3 of the SDG Blockchain Accelerator is to keep the country-office “wish list” coming, but push for requests written with an engineering mindset, clear inputs and outputs, so the private sector can match problems to solutions faster.

Giving AI agents a wallet, an ID and a paper trail 

Patrick Tobler’s starting point was a thought experiment that Masumi Network was built to answer: if your personal AI agent asks a Booking.com agent to book a flight, and that agent talks to airline agents, and you end up at the airport with no ticket whose fault was it? He laid out four problems that have to be solved before enterprises will trust agents to act on their own:

Masumi’s approach takes the result of an agent’s action, hashes it, and puts it on-chain so disputes can be traced back to the agent that actually got it wrong. When asked what he’d want from large institutions, Tobler answered, “don’t get locked into one big AI provider’s. Push toward open-source, decentralised infrastructure that no single company can gatekeep or tax.“

What a sovereign AI stack actually looks like 

Gustav Friis took the conversation from agent-to-agent plumbing to government strategy. NEAR has been working with small, fast-moving states like Bermuda’s work on confidential AI for public services. A question every public institution now faces: staff want to use tools like OpenAI or Claude, but how do they do that and stay compliant? 

His framing for a “sovereign stack” is avoid lock-in to any single technology, keep transparency where it builds trust (budgets, audits) but confidentiality where it’s needed. Above all, verifiable execution like cryptographic proof that a system did what it claims is still missing in most AI deployments, and it’s exactly the gap that caused Patrick’s flight-booking failure. 

His last recommendation to the UN is to build on existing frameworks like GovStack and the Blockchain Advisory Group, and create a shared, open, cross-agency knowledge base that multiple AI systems can independently inspect and verify so good practice doesn’t stay locked inside individual pilots.

Is the UN too slow for AI? 

Ben put the hardest question to the panel directly: at last month’s Proof of Talk event in Paris, more than one person told him the UN moves too slowly to matter on AI governance. Was that fair? 

All three speakers pushed back! Sun pointed out that UNDP’s Blockchain Advisory Group is already moving faster than many national regulators but the gap is internal literacy on how to translate real-world problems into AI-ready requests. Tobler called the panel itself “proof the UN can act,” even if coordination across such a large system is inevitably harder. Friis added, “the UN reflects the average of its member states, and what looks slow from one country looks like real progress from another.”

The session closed on a phrase Sun used to describe what FLock and others are building: a “third species” of AI that is neither closed-source US models nor open-source Chinese ones, but decentralised models nobody fully owns or controls. Whether that third option becomes real, the panel agreed, will depend on exactly the kind of infrastructure like wallets, identity, verifiable logs, federated training that was discussed throughout the session. 

Missed our talk? You can check out the recording here.

Get involved

The UN Blockchain Community of Practice (CoP) works best when colleagues bring practical questions, field-tested lessons and cases that challenge easy assumptions. UNDP’s third SDG Blockchain Accelerator cohort is launching soon, if any of the work from FLock, Masumi, or NEAR resonates with a challenge in your office, reach out!

For more details or suggestions, contact Ben Thompson Coon, UN Blockchain CoP Lead; ben.thompsoncoon@undp.org

Environmental sustainability has become one of blockchain’s favorite talking points. Even so, carbon credits, drought insurance, climate adaptation loans, renewable energy certificates, and biodiversity finance do not usually occupy the same conversation for long. In the seventh Blockchain Talks, they did!

What held them together was neither a shared market nor a shared asset class, but a shared operational problem. In each case, money, claims and decisions depend on records that must be trusted across multiple actors, while the realities behind those records remain difficult to verify or audit. The session, then, was more about where the technology begins to matter once environmental work runs into questions of integrity, coordination and implementation. 

Opening the session, Robert Pasicko situated the discussion within UNDP’s own pipeline. Environmental sustainability, he noted, is no longer a side strand in blockchain work. On the contrary, it has become one of the liveliest areas of experimentation, precisely because teams are testing whether the technology can solve something concrete. The real test, as he put it, is not whether blockchain sounds relevant, but “how do we actually make it work?” 

That question found its clearest answer in the speakers’ experiences in their projects. In Adam Spiers’ account of Toucan Protocol, blockchain helps where carbon markets need traceability that can survive market activity. Toucan’s work brings carbon credits on-chain in a way that remains verifiable “to guard against double counting,” while also making it easier to build liquid instruments around assets that are otherwise slow and fragmented to manage. In that sense, blockchain is being applied as market infrastructure. 

With Etherisc, the technology appeared in a different role. Christoph Mussenbrock showed how blockchain can help coordinate climate insurance across farmers, NGOs, governments, insurers, and reinsurers that do not naturally share a trusted system. When payouts depend on satellite data, sampling, and rapid execution rather than slow claims processing, that shared layer starts to matter. Just as importantly, he made clear where the technology should disappear from view: “No farmer should bother about wallets and private keys and cryptography.” 

In the electricity market, the value proposition sharpened further. Gideon Maasz of Fuel Switch focused on renewable energy certification, where the issue is proving in auditable terms how much exported electricity is actually renewable. Once those claims begin carrying tax or trade consequences, credibility ceases to be a reporting preference and becomes a commercial requirement. Hence his insistence that environmental claims need “quantifiable data.”

Elsewhere, the same logic surfaced in climate adaptation finance and nature-based investment. Speaking about Cladfy’s work with UNDP Bangladesh, Ebby Gatamu described a system designed to move climate finance to rural women in ways that are more accessible, more trackable, and more dignified, allowing them to apply “from the comfort of their home.” From a different corner of the field, Juan Pedro Piñeirua showed how blockchain can help structure environmental value so that capital flows and ecological outcomes are easier to follow over time. In his words, the larger question is “How do we bridge the gap between the market and the protection of life-supporting systems?” 

Taken together, the session gave a more grounded answer to its own title. Blockchain helped where environmental work needed claims, flows, and records to remain legible across many actors at once. That is a narrower answer than the hype usually offers, but a far more credible one. 

Missed our talk? Watch the recording here.  

You can also explore previous Blockchain Talks sessions in our YouTube Playlist.

Get involved

The UN Blockchain Community of Practice (CoP) works best when colleagues bring practical questions, field-tested lessons and cases that challenge easy assumptions.

Join the UN Blockchain Cop

For more details or suggestions, contact Ben Thompson Coon, UN Blockchain CoP Lead; ben.thompsoncoon@undp.org

In 2025, the SDG Blockchain Accelerator delivered 46 pilot- and implementation-ready solutions, with 12 already entering real-world testing. Developed across two global cohorts, 70% of these solutions are embedded within ongoing national and regional programmes – positioning them to move beyond standalone experiments and into active use.

The SDG Blockchain Accelerator was created to connect innovators with development challenges and turn ideas into impact. While interest in blockchain has grown in recent years – from traceable transactions and auditable data to improvements in payments and service delivery – a persistent question has remained: how to design solutions that can operate within institutional, regulatory, and operational realities. To address this, the Accelerator brings together UNDP, technical partners, and innovators into a structured, multi-partner platform that supports solutions from concept to deployment.

Strategically led by the United Nations Development Programme’s Alternative Finance Lab (AltFinLab), in partnership with the Blockchain for Good Alliance (BGA), EMURGO Labs, FLock Technology Holdings, Stellar Development Foundation, and Sui Foundation, the global initiative helps scale blockchain and decentralized AI solutions to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

A structured pathway from demand to deployment

In many innovation efforts, the challenge is not generating ideas or prototypes, but ensuring that solutions can function within existing systems. The Accelerator links demand, solution development, and implementation planning into a single process, helping move ideas from exploration to practical application.

It is built around a demand-led model, where UNDP Country Offices define concrete development challenges grounded in ongoing programmes and national priorities. Across the portfolio, blockchain is being applied to address a consistent set of system-level issues – from inefficient financial flows and weak data integrity to fragmented supply chains and low-trust governance environments – where verification, transparency, and coordination are essential.

From there, UNDP AltFinLab matches challenge owners with solution makers and technical partners through a structured process – moving from problem definition to roadmap, and from roadmap to pilot readiness. Open calls and hackathons serve as mechanisms for aligning different actors around a shared problem, allowing ideas to be tested and refined before entering acceleration.

The programme operates through a multi-partner, track-based model that brings together multiple technical ecosystems while maintaining a coordinated and neutral approach. This allows challenges to be matched with the most suitable solutions and platforms. By working across multiple blockchain ecosystems, the Accelerator reduces dependency on any single technology stack and increases adaptability across different country contexts. Interoperability is also a defining feature of the portfolio, with nearly 90% of solutions either already supporting or planning cross-chain integration.

Crucially, teams are expected to define how solutions would function under real conditions, including governance, budgeting, and integration into existing processes. At the core of this process is the roadmap – a structured output that translates a development challenge into an implementable pathway, aligning stakeholders, technical design, governance, and financing considerations. This emphasis on operational readiness helps address a common point of friction in innovation efforts.

Where demand is consolidating

The portfolio of solutions that has emerged from this process also reveals where blockchain is beginning to demonstrate practical value.

Digital payments and financial inclusion account for the largest share of solutions, followed by climate finance and environmental integrity, and transparent and responsible production. Together, these clusters make up the majority of the portfolio, pointing to areas where systems rely on trust, coordination, and shared data across multiple actors – and where existing approaches often struggle with fragmentation and limited transparency.

The portfolio spans a diverse set of solutions – from payment systems designed to improve last-mile delivery, to carbon registries that strengthen climate market integrity, supply chain platforms that enable traceability across production networks, and digital identity and credentialing tools for verifiable impact tracking.

For example, in contexts where financial systems rely on cash, manual processes, or fragmented infrastructure – as in Haiti and Syria – blockchain-based payment solutions are being designed to deliver funds directly to individuals. This reduces delays, improves traceability, and increases transparency in how resources are distributed. In one pilot, a government disbursement process that currently requires waiting up to six months for loan guarantee payments is being automated, helping small businesses – particularly women-led enterprises that are disproportionately affected by such delays – receive funds faster and more reliably.

Many of these are designed as components that can be integrated into broader public systems, strengthening core functions rather than operating in isolation.

From institutional readiness to public-sector engagement

Beyond solution development, the Accelerator is strengthening institutional readiness to engage with emerging technologies. For 82% of participating UNDP Country Offices, this was their first direct experience with blockchain or similar technologies. By the end of the programme, the share reporting high or very high understanding increased from 21% to 60%, indicating a clear progression from initial exposure to practical capability.

This growing readiness is reflected in how solutions are developed and adopted. UNDP Country Offices act as “challenge owners,” grounding each solution in national priorities and convening stakeholders around it. This ensures alignment with government strategies, regulatory environments, and operational realities from the outset.

Public-sector engagement is therefore built into the process. Government and public-sector entities are involved in 73% of solutions, with more than half engaging policymakers or regulators directly. This creates clearer pathways toward adoption, with solutions shaped in close interaction with the institutions expected to use them.

The model also expands the ecosystem around these efforts. More than 120 external partners contributed across the portfolio, with solution makers being able to work directly with public institutions – a connection that is often difficult to establish in practice. This strengthens the link between innovation and implementation environments.

Connecting to a broader blockchain practice

A selection of use cases and pilots developed through the Accelerator are featured in the newly released New Tech, New Partners publication, which brings together more than 40 blockchain applications across regions.

This report highlights the geographic spread and diversity of blockchain applications across development contexts. Across it, blockchain is increasingly used as a coordination and trust layer – supporting how data, payments, and decisions move across systems in more transparent and verifiable ways.

Together, these examples point to a growing body of practice around how blockchain can support digital public infrastructure and public-purpose systems in concrete, applied settings.

The remaining bottleneck: from pilot to scale

The main constraint is no longer whether these solutions work, but whether they can be sustained and scaled. Many are ready to move forward but lack the financing, partnerships, and operational support required to move beyond pilot stages. The challenge has shifted from designing viable solutions to ensuring they are taken up and maintained within public systems.

Building on these lessons, Cohort 3 of the Accelerator will aim to anchor each solution in an existing country programme or programmatic framework with at least one year of operational runway,  and a clear implementation context. This shifts the centre of gravity from innovation showcase to institutional delivery: Country Offices and UN agency teams bring the development challenge and the programmatic home, Solution Makers bring production-ready technology, and the Accelerator provides the structure to connect the two. The opportunity now is to move from “proof that it works” to “proof that it scales”, embedding solutions within the programmes, partnerships, and budgets that already exist, so they can deliver tangible, sustained impact.

Stay tuned for our Cohort 3 open call!

The Accelerator is powered by catalytic funding from Cardano’s treasury via Project Catalyst, with support from other partners.

By the time a product or service reaches the end user, most of the difficult work has already been done elsewhere. Someone had to collect the right data and keep it attached to the right goods. Another person had to verify it and carry it through a chain involving tens of actors. Crucially, traceability only becomes relevant when records survive the chain itself – this was the real subject of the sixth UN Blockchain Talks.

This session was valuable because it remained grounded to that reality. Three industry leaders and practitioners — Sam Lambert of zenGate Global, Mark Kaplan of Wholechain, and André Vanyi-Robin of Plastiks — spoke about the conditions that make traceability work, or fail, once systems leave the slide deck and meet the field.

The session began with the challenging process of data capture in the upstream reality, then moved on to the middle of the chain, where records need to be transferred between different parties and systems. Later on, we moved on to plastic recovery, where weak records are becoming increasingly difficult to justify to auditors and regulators. By the end of the Talk, the audience had gained a more practical understanding of what trustworthy traceability actually demands than a general case for blockchain.

The first problem is rarely technical

Sam Lambert opened with a phrase that stayed with the rest of the session: “bush to boardroom.” His point was that the people setting the rules for compliance, risk and reporting are often far removed from the people expected to collect the first data.

In agricultural supply chains, for example, traceability often begins in places with poor connectivity and manual processes. These places also have limited training and strong local systems of trust that do not automatically align with the logic of a digital compliance framework. Sam put it bluntly: “Technology isn’t a silver bullet. In fact, I think it often just exposes where the issues are.”

He also made a point that deserves to be heard beyond this session: “We’re here to design systems around people.” This may sound obvious, but much of the traceability sector still operates in the opposite way. New systems are introduced and new reporting demands are added, placing the burden on communities that were not involved in the initial design process. Sam’s remarks brought the conversation back to the ground: consent, training, workable workflows, offline functionality and field conditions are all integral to the system.

Good records are not enough if they cannot move

Mark Kaplan continued the discussion at the point where products move beyond the first mile and enter a more crowded supply chain. Here, the focus shifts to whether that data can travel with the goods in a form that can be used by others.

Even if a supply chain has portals, dashboards, audits and QR codes, it may still fall short of real traceability if the records are not tied to actual lots and transformation events. Mark described Wholechain’s approach as event-based and grounded in GS1 standards, with records that remain linked to the movement of physical goods.

That is where his remarks on fatigue landed well. When Sam spoke about farmer fatigue, Mark added another phrase to the session: “Portal fatigue.” He used this term to describe the situation where people in the middle of the supply chain are forced to work across disconnected, non-interoperable proprietary systems. Traceability improves when data can be understood by different systems without losing meaning. This is why standards were so important in Mark’s discussion.

In waste recovery, weak proof is no longer enough

André Vanyi-Robin took the session into plastic recovery, where the pressure for stronger records is no longer theoretical. He stated clearly: “There is no traceable proof of recovery. The existing standard practice are spreadsheets, which obviously don’t survive the audits.”

He described a sector where data is fragmented among recyclers, producers, and regulators, and there is no shared connection strong enough to support compliance reporting. In that setting, blockchain technology is important because it provides a continuous record. It stores proof without exposing sensitive commercial data. As he explained, “You have verifiable proof of impact without exposing sensitive data.”

André also tied this back to everyday implementation. In his view, the answer is not to force companies into yet another cumbersome platform, but rather to integrate with existing ERP and product information systems, and “not force additional complexities at the level of verification”.

The stronger lesson sat between the talk

The value of the session came from how these three perspectives met. Sam dealt with first-mile reality and the human side of system design. Mark dealt with standards, interoperability and how records stay attached to goods. André dealt with compliance-grade proof and what happens once records carry legal and financial weight.

Seen together, the message was that blockchain becomes useful only when the rest of the system is already serious about data, process and trust.

Missed our talk? Watch the recording here.  

You can also explore previous Blockchain Talks sessions in our YouTube Playlist.

Get involved

The UN Blockchain Community of Practice (CoP) works best when colleagues bring practical questions, field-tested lessons and cases that challenge easy assumptions.

Join the UN Blockchain Cop

For more details or suggestions, contact Ben Thompson Coon, UN Blockchain CoP Lead; ben.thompsoncoon@undp.org