# Bhutan National Digital ID: an Experiment in Civic Tech - Panel || EPS 2025 Workshop - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-01-09 - Duration: 23:25 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, privacy stack, devconnect, 2025, eps25, pse, privacy stewards of ehtereum, ethereum foundation, ef, Education - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-bdg9EJfzKUQ - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdg9EJfzKUQ ## Description Panel discussion with Austin Griffith (EF), Anand Acharya (Bhutan National Digital ID), Kinzang Dorji (Bhutan National Digital ID) about digital identities and Bhutan's system and DIDs. Ethereum Privacy Stack is a global privacy summit during Devconnect 2025 bringing together Ethereum builders, protocol maintainers, and advocates. Featuring Vitalik Buterin, Roger Dingledine, Andy Guzman, Polymutex, Ameen Soleimani, and 30+ speakers on 2 stages, celebrating privacy acceleration. Ethereum Privacy Stack: http://eps25.web3privacy.info Organized by Web3Privacy Now & Privacy Stewards of Ethereum Web3Privacy now collective: http://web3privacy.info Privacy Stewards of Ethereum: https://pse.dev/ ## Transcript [applause] Thank you. Uh I had the amazing opportunity to join you guys in Bhutan uh maybe five six months ago when we were talking about implementing this on Ethereum. Uh the the system is really interesting. the the NDI system in particular, uh the way citizens are using it and and how it works. I wonder if we could just start with just an introduction to how the NDI system works and how uh a normal citizen is using NDI today uh in Bhutan. >> So Bhutan NDI system I think it's uh uh to to to tell more about it, I think we have to go a bit more further. uh post uh pre- pandemic. So when Bhutan took a step to really move into a digitalized and knowledge based uh economy. So what happened was apart from Bhutan NDI there are several other projects uh that's going on that's uh looking to digitalize uh most of the services for taxation system uh like uh med medical system and then we have lots of other system but in order to tie up all the system uh the government uh and the our stakeholder they thought that we need a robust digital ID system. So of course when we started we started with much of a centralized model because we didn't have any idea or or any reference point like how it works because this digital ID system is uh called a flagship uh project which ties all the digital program uh projects that's going on. So what happens was uh we started with centralized approach but later on at the at the later phase of the project we realized that this is a raw uh this is a old system that's going to phase out if you make a centralized system and on top of that our his majesty the king also he advised us that to look forward to a wave three innovation uh look forward to decentralized approach which gives more power to the people more uh more control of their own data. So that's when we stumbled upon a very beautiful philosophy of self-serving identity. So self-serving identity did mature because of verifiable credential uh did decentralized identifier the digital signature and the blockchain they all actually came together to make it possible. So that's why we we also felt uh of course we didn't have much of a reference point or example to look into. So at first uh yes I think that was one of the beginning we had a good leadership who was foresightful to uh tell us that uh wave three is the way forward that's future safe and that and combined with giving a power to citizen so that they have their own control over the data >> a really interesting uh push where a very centralized power is telling you you need to be more decentralized sort of the king says we need to be more decentralized Uh it's kind of this interesting effect of you guys are able to dec you are able to decentralize faster because you had his majesty the king a very centralized figure saying we should decentralize and therefore a lot of businesses started or government agencies started implementing the NDI system. Sorry to interrupt but but keep but keep going. Can we can we talk through you you said let's just pick out one of those government agencies like what what's a good example of uh the the user flow of a uh citizen who has the NDI app and they go into some government agency and instead of having to fill out a giant form with all of their personal information they get a QR code they scan the QR code they uh sign a message with an ECDSA key pair saying this is my information or I have this information and uh then the government agency gets the information they need from that signature. Is that is that sort of the flow? Can we talk through that? Yeah. >> Yeah. So [clears throat] uh I think uh right now the our citizen like citizens of our country they are uh getting onboarded to Bhutan NDI system like a Bhutan NDI wallet where uh they are validated with the department of civil registration and census and then they get onboarded into Bhutan NDI wallet and they are being issued uh issued with the foundation credential or foundation ID which is actually a legal identifier. uh in our country >> in like 2023 it became government legal right? >> Yes. Yes. And uh right now like what we do is now with the bank like uh with the bank uh and like digitizing their services uh even uh for the citizens to open the bank account they simply have to visit their website of the bank and they can simply scan a QR code share the information requested by the bank and it's open within a minute which actually like uh citizens before have to visit the bank physically fill up the forms. So now I think uh with this integrated services online so they can open the bank account from their home >> which is better than what it's like for me in the United States to open a bank account. I still go into the brickandmortar place and fill out a bunch of forms and give up a bunch of personal identifiable information. It would be so much nicer if I could come in and basically wallet connect with my Ethereum wallet and sign up for a bank account. And that's basically the user flow for your citizens. >> Exactly. >> That's amazing. Okay, so we're here. We're talking about privacy. Let's talk about how this system actually leads to more privacy or how the citizens information lives on their NDI wallet and never leaves unencrypted and is just the signature basically. Can can we talk about private information and how it flows within this system? Yeah, I think uh the identity model for our identity platform has been like uh based on the self-s sovereign identity philosophy. So the philosophy is like uh it's the a big shift towards where the identity ownership is move from platform to the user. So I think this move to uh itself is a big achievement for the privacy where the information lives on the user's device. In addition to that one like having uh making it a consent based system where the users are aware of what information is being shared to whom. I think that this is also one of the critical uh privacy thing that we need to consider and on top of that uh there are certain uh zero knowledge proof features like proving that I'm over 18 without actually disclosing the age as well as uh uh supporting for selective disclosure. I think uh the privacy has been at the core of our the design of our identity platform >> and no zero knowledge proofs yet but is this like a future feature you want to add or what what do you guys think for zero knowledge proofs? Uh yeah so there's no like standard zero knowledge proof but uh of course we have made some customization and we have found a way around like uh in which like with the proof credential we are doing some computation uh on the wallet and in through the web hook to present some kind of zero knowledge proof of course uh we have we have created that uh feature but uh there we have not really deployed it on the production but that's why uh this is a good platform actually we are fishing out for a good zero knowledge proof protocols and I heard that EF is also coming up with good new initiatives that we want to adopt very soon. >> Yeah. Uh I think in addition to that one with the recent integration with Ethereum. So I think we are hoping for like we're looking forward to implement more zero knowledge proof features into our identity platform. >> Yes. And the ZK nerds are much nerdier than I am. I'm just an Ethereum application nerd too. So find find the guys here. There's a lot of them here. Some smart folks. So, uh, yeah, let's talk about the the blockchain aspect of this, right? So, we've got a user who has a key pair and personal identifi identifying information on their device that doesn't leave their device. We have uh organizations and government uh entities that have these like QR codes that they scan to sign. Uh, and then where where does the blockchain come in here? I think it's it's really interesting because uh the the basically the DID registry if you could talk about that a little bit. It's it's a really uh elegant solution for doing a lot of basically off-chain signatures that settle and verify onchain, right? Do you guys want to talk about just the the registry and how th those those off-chain uh signatures basically prove onchain or just the Ethereum aspect of this? >> Yeah. Uh I think uh one key uh important thing to note here is that we are only using the blockchain for uh the trust anchor like the personal uh identifiable information are never stored on the blockchain. >> So we are only storing the DID that is decentralized identifier and the public key. So whenever issuers issue certain credential to the users they uh sign that claims with their p signing key which is later when the user shares those information to the verifier then it looks up to the blockchain retrieves the public key and it verifies that verifies the digital signature which actually authenticates the claims so that it has not been tampered >> and and this has a beautiful private elegant system here where you're not having to make transactions on Ethereum every time you even issue a credential, right? The DID is able to issue credentials by making signatures and then you're able to verify those signatures by just reading from any node on the block on the Ethereum network. So you're you're utilizing the 100% uptime of Ethereum to be able to read that these are valid signatures, but you aren't having to pay gas to write to the blockchain because they're all these off-chain signatures thanks to what the work that like did a long time ago, right? The DID registry was from consensus, I think. >> Uh yes, I think we used the port I think but then it was quite old old it's like 5 years old, right? and his team had to really work. I think I have to be thankful about you also. You also helped us a lot through that journey. So yeah, so that was something that we had done and also we also actually have on top of that uh uh document signing feature actually. So that actually uses u uh blockchain the Ethereum where we store the hash of the documents. So that's a separate uh user feature which is similar to doco sign but uh we take each wallet actually as their own private key public to sign documents. So those hashes are stored in the blockchain uh ethereum but of course that's something that still we have to wait for the people to take it up but I think that is one of the most popular use cases that's rapidly been adopted by companies across Bhutan right now. Great. And and if we're just talking about while we're on the topic of the blockchain footprint, we can say that you've got the DID registry, you you have the DID that's making the signatures that's allowing the issue the credential issuers to issue their credentials. Almost all of this is done through reading. Your verifier is doing lots of reads. Uh but there's also the schema registry. Is that right? And the schema registry actually like JSON is getting written on chain and there is some gas being paid there. But that's just once per like type of credential. Is that right? >> Yeah. So the schema uh is a one time right to the transa uh one time right to the chain and it's basically defining the template for issuing the cred credential which can be again like reused by other issuers as well. So it's using the template to map to the users claim and then get uh like issued to the uh users. So the blockchain is here almost all just for readon, right? Which is really an elegant way to use Ethereum. You you write your schema once and you register your DID. Do we is there even a transaction for the DID or is it all one all signatures? Like is there ever a transaction on the DID registry or is it all just signatures? >> For now I think since we are only anchoring the >> Oh yeah, there's like custom data you have to do. If you have to like if our use cases require adding like delegation key or updating the service endpoint then it requires writing on the chain. >> But this is yeah such an elegant way to use Ethereum using a smart contract that was deployed four or five years ago and a signature system with ECDSA key pairs. Your citizens can collect these credentials that are legally binding in your government. Your verifier can read from Ethereum, an always on peer-to-peer uh system, and then they can verify it using cryptography that these credentials are valid at all times with very little actual having to make onchain transactions other than the schema registry and the hashes you were talking about. This is and it's a whole like government ID system that works and a a lot of institutions within your your society are using them, right? like all of these government agencies are using. >> Uh yeah, I think also there's another push in which I think uh going back to the previous talks. So uh slowly in the few next few five to four to five years the API call between agency to agency is going to be completely phased out. So that's when the the the real power of the privacy will come into effect where now the organization has to ask the individual user for data rather than API call from a bank going all the way to some telecom to get information. So slowly we are also coming up with uh rules and uh plan to that there will be no longer uh B2B API calls to each other. >> Yeah, this is I mean this is a good point to get into. We talked about zero knowledge proofs a little bit, but what does the future of We're like next to another really loud stage. What does the future of the NDI system look like? What do you guys see happening? Maybe even if mindfulness city plays into this a little bit like what where is the future of NDI for Bhutan? >> Uh so NDI right now so it's it's uh once so we have almost uh 50% uh 50% onboarding of the citizens. So once it reaches uh some substantial number so that's when we look into uh like I just pointed out so uh it's going to be the hub of all the digital transaction uh I mean interaction that happens within the uh organization to individual and thing. So but then right immediately we want to make it possible for people like Kang mentioned that uh people should be able to open their bank from their own home. Of course we have five or six banks uh in Bhutan that we are trying to integrate with. We have integrated with few but uh to be frankly it's a new technology and there's skeptism involved with that uh and we need to first overcome that skeptism or reluctances but then we are looking one of the major project that we are looking into is to see if we can conduct elections. >> Yes. >> So that's one we are also fishing for good election protocols out here. So Austin, maybe we talk about we should like some ZK voting could. So that one of the issues with holding an election on chain is civil resistance. But when you have a really good identity system that solves the civil resistance >> that's would say we have solved the identity system but the the tagging tag along of the other part of the voting with privacy is something that we need to overcome. >> Yeah. uh just to add on like as the ident like the ident identity was meant to be the foundation and I think now with the integration of Ethereum which is which has large ecosystem of smart contract so many centralized application can be developed and I think Bhutan NDI can be used as the identity layer which which has been missing in the web three web three world so I think this opens up lots of other use cases where I think we can implement using Bhutan India as the identity layer >> and while I was there We ran a bunch of hackathons. Uh, one of the hackathons, the second one was about the land registry system. Yeah. Is there eventually a plan to do these land credentials where you can buy and sell land through the NDI system on chain? I mean, that could be years out, but it still sounds like it's something that's at least being experimented with, and we're trying to figure out what that footprint could look like on Ethereum. >> I think you you you were also in the hackathon for the land thing. So uh there is a group of people as a startup working on tokenization of land and apart from that uh NDI also has a road map later on of course we will not be involved as much in the tokenization and the real uses of blockchain NFT SFT in the whole land uh transaction thing but we are going to provide the uh identity which will enable the people to do that but there's another uh another innovation hub within the our parent company called Inotech I don't know if you were able So is someone that's looking into tokenization land and all those things. So I think we have done a few P but yeah we look forward to working more closely with them in the coming immedate future. >> I I've already kind of answered my own question of like the Ethereum footprint and why Ethereum works so well for this. But when you first started exploring the identity space and blockchain space, it started with Hyperledger [laughter] and then and then you moved into you know public blockchains make a lot more sense. You want to talk about that transition at all or maybe early missteps or steps or whatever we would call them learning moments. >> Yeah. So I think initially during the inception of the project we uh started with the uh indie blockchains like uh hyperledger uh ed is like hyperledger indie uh I think that time uh the network was called sovereign so we are using the sovereign ledger for anchoring the DIDs and all uh later we switched to polygon network uh right currently I think uh we are using the polygon blockchain for anchoring the schema and we have added support for Ethereum blockchain >> and there's a difference there. Okay, there like uh in terms of decentralization and security when you're not making when you're running a highfrequency prediction market, Polygon makes a lot of sense, right? When you need to write a small amount of things on chain and then you need to read those things in a very secure, very dependable, always on kind of way, Ethereum starts to make a lot more sense, right? And this this is why Ethereum was the perfect fit for this because you have just a few rights. it's worth paying the money to write those down because they're then they're there forever and always on and anyone can get to them. And so I'm kind of answering my own question here, but this is this is why Ethereum is so powerful and perfect for this. >> So one of the one of the main reasons why we uh chose Polygon was that in schools and colleges across Bhutan so the like I mentioned the knowledge based economy. So we the there was a people are been trained on polygon. So that's what it's their first blockchain. So what we also wanted to make sure was at that point of time that we have a steady streamline of people coming into India or the industry ecosystem which knows this blockchain. So now I think Ethereum is also been one of the uh component that's added in those education. So we are confident because of that. >> We love Polygon too. Polygon. I mean, just a different slightly different security model, slightly different, but uh yeah, uh good friends at Polygon. Uh but Ethereum is slightly more decentralized, slightly more safe and secure. And if you're doing low rights, high reads, this is a a perfect uh thing for it. Especially if you're a whole nation state trying to run an identity system, you want the level of security that you get from Ethereum. Okay, let's close it out. Uh we we talked about future of NDI already. Can you just give us a glimpse of we we hinted at the mindfulness city. I think there's just some neat things with Bitcoin, with electricity, with Bhutan. There's just some neat things happening there. Folks should should travel there if they're allowed to. It's a really beautiful place. Flying into Pero is so beautiful. Uh driving to Thimpoo is so such a fun uh journey. Can you just give us any closing remarks about the future of Bhutan and maybe some of these places to to be keeping an eye on? >> Yeah, I think you uh I'm happy that you enjoyed being there. I heard a lot of good review about you from Kenzang and Dave and also I mean we are thankful that you helped along with Zoe and you your team. So so that's why we could finish the Ethereum project in a very small time. So regarding GMC for for NGI it depends on how is the adoption in Bhutan like how do we because GMC is a special administrative region which has a uh special economy where it's mostly technology based so that but then NDI going inside there and being adopted will depend on how we as a team are able to create uh value based system from the NDI. So yeah, so that would be in the near future. Let's see how it goes around. So and yeah, so uh for the Bitcoin and stuffs we the electricity uh because it's electricity is cheap in Bhutan. So that's why that's something that we can offer to do with the mining and all those things set up and also since you touch touch upon that they we also have plans to use this abundant electricity cheaper electricity we have to see if we can open data center for AI modeling and computing and all stuffs like that. So there are a lot of innovation happening. So I would invite people to come around help us also and help Bhutan also with the all the innovation and technology that uh development that we are creating right now. >> You you'd like visitors and specifically highly technical visitors that uh can do teaching and and helping with that. Right. All right. Uh Anand Kenzang, welcome to Ethereum. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having us here. years ago.