Reimagining urban finance: How Western Balkan innovators are transforming cities

Imagine earning city credits for walking to work, helping choose where trees get planted through your phone, or discovering your morning coffee supports local culture.

In the Western Balkans, entrepreneurs are creating new tools to reshape how thousands of people connect with their cities—from apps that reward sustainable habits to platforms for crowdfunding greener streets.

The BOOST Urban Future Finance acceleration programme, launched by UNDP and SocialTechLab with support from the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic, is supporting ventures that address the region’s most pressing urban challenges, including limited access to capital, outdated infrastructure, and barriers to engaging communities.

Among the 2024 BOOST cohort, City & Me, Muqa, and QX Ventures offer powerful examples of how financial innovation can support citizen engagement and sustainable urban living. Each presents a unique approach to rethinking civic participation and local economies—demonstrating how reimagined financial tools can create more transparent, participatory, and resilient cities.

City & Me: Tokenizing civic engagement

Launched in Niš, Serbia, City & Me is more than just an app—it’s a new kind of civic infrastructure. It gamifies sustainable behavior by rewarding people for walking, biking, recycling, and engaging with local civic life.

“We measure how many steps you make during one month and how many kilometers by riding a bike,” explains Branko Krsmanović, CEO and co-founder. “If you reach a goal of 100 kilometers, you generate tokens in your digital wallet.”

Users earn city tokens, which they can redeem for rewards like cinema tickets, local business discounts, or even planting a tree in a public park with their name on it—complete with a digital tag that shows the tree’s location and how much CO₂ it offsets. Tokens can also be donated to local causes; in one campaign, collective donations activated a corporate gift of a ton of animal food for a local shelter.

Since launching, the platform has attracted more than 30,000 users in Niš—about 15% of the city’s population—who have collectively taken over 13 billion steps and planted more than 2,800 trees.

“But the problem in our region isn’t just pollution or recycling—it’s the lack of communication between citizens and cities,” said Krsmanović. “After elections, people often feel like their voice disappears. We wanted to build a bridge between citizens and municipalities.” 

In addition to promoting sustainable habits, the app allows users to report local issues (like potholes or illegal dumping), vote in community surveys about urban improvements (such as what to build in a neighborhood park), and receive relevant local city updates.

By creating a digital ecosystem where everyday actions are recognized and rewarded, City & Me empowers citizens to actively shape the cities they live in—not just as voters, but as co-creators of greener, more participatory urban spaces.

The platform is now expanding to other cities across Serbia, as well as North Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovenia. Through the BOOST programme, the team formed a key partnership with the city of Strumica—opening the door to international expansion and cross-border municipal collaboration.

Muqa: Democratic city greening through blockchain

What if citizens could directly vote on and fund the development of green spaces in their cities—with fairness and transparency?

That’s the idea behind Zazelenimo (“Let’s Make it Green”), the flagship platform developed by Muqa, a Croatian startup founded in 2023. By applying quadratic funding and blockchain technology, Zazelenimo makes participatory budgeting more accessible, efficient, and community-driven.

“Participatory budgeting is often clunky and opaque. Few people engage, and even fewer understand how decisions are made,” explains Tomislav Mamić, Muqa’s founder. “With Zazelenimo, we’re redesigning the system around trust, fairness, and ease of participation.”

Quadratic funding ensures that projects with broader community support receive more resources, leveling the playing field between grassroots initiatives and better-funded initiatives, backed by larger donors. In this context, blockchain tech guarantees transparent, tamper-proof voting and fund distribution.

In Split (Croatia), the city partnered with Muqa to pilot Zazelenimo and committed to triple-match citizen donations—ensuring that community-backed projects receive not only startup funding but also maintenance support for the next three to four years.

Still in its early stages, with plans to expand to other Western Balkan countries, Zazelenimo envisions a future where citizens routinely propose and fund green projects—like pocket parks, community gardens, or public seating—directly from their phones. Each proposal is refined through a public forum where citizens and urban planners collaborate to improve ideas before funding decisions are made.

“If you want to change something in your city—a lamppost, a bench—there’s usually a long bureaucratic path. You have to call, email, find the right person,” Mamić says. “With Zazelenimo, you just submit a proposal and ask your neighbors to support it.”

This streamlined, community-first approach not only speeds up local action—it builds civic trust. “The goal isn’t just more parks,” says Mamić. “It’s more trust. It’s helping people feel that their voice matters and that they can shape the city they live in.”

For Mamić, the blockchain technology behind this enables deeper democratic participation: “If you have active citizens—not just interacting with government, but also with each other—you build stronger bonds. That’s how democracy works better.”

QX Ventures: Building decentralized city networks

In Athens, Greece, a different experiment in urban finance is underway. QX Ventures, co-founded by Zoran Nasteski, has developed a decentralized engagement platform that returns control of data and relationships to cities and their residents.

The Skopje-based team created a blockchain-enabled network that connects restaurants, citizens, tourists, and municipalities—starting with a simple entry point: the digital menu.

“Restaurants are often overlooked in urban innovation,” said Nasteski. “They’re small, overworked, and don’t have time for tech—let alone blockchain. But they’re also cultural hubs with massive foot traffic. That’s where we saw an opportunity.”

With QX Menu, diners scan a QR code to access a privacy-first digital menu. What begins as a convenience becomes a gateway: users can create a digital wallet, earn tokens for their activity, and redeem them for local rewards—from discounts to free entry at cultural sites. The tools are open-source and free to use, helping restaurants join a broader digital ecosystem without costly tech upgrades or data risks.

Under the hood, blockchain ensures secure, data-respecting infrastructure—giving cities the ability to also issue their own tokens, like Athens Coin or Skopje Token, and build loyalty-based economies around local participation.

The company is currently piloting in Athens, with 100 restaurants onboarded. Plans are underway to expand in Skopje and Florence, where discussions include launching a cross-city token system.

By shifting the focus from advertising and data extraction to loyalty and shared value, QX is working on a new kind of urban economy—one where everyday interactions generate benefits that stay within the city.

“It’s not just about tech,” says Nasteski. “It’s about cities reclaiming their digital space and building systems that work for their people—not just platforms.”

The future of urban finance in the Western Balkans

What binds these three ventures isn’t just their use of tokens, QR codes, or apps—it’s their reimagining of finance as a civic tool. The BOOST: Urban Future Finance acceleration programme created a space for this kind of experimentation, supporting ventures to grow their ideas and pilots through mentorship, hands-on learning, and regional connections.

As cities everywhere face climate stress, urban growth, and eroding trust, the Balkans may offer an unexpected lesson: that smart cities aren’t defined by sensors or data alone, but by people—and the tools that empower them to shape their own futures.

Or, as Krsmanović from City & Me puts it: “Cities need to stop thinking of citizens as passive users. They’re partners. And when you give people tools to co-create their city, magic happens.”