Ethereum as digital public infrastructure
A briefing for governments, public agencies, international organizations, and regulated institutions evaluating shared infrastructure for digital identity, payments, and data exchange.
Digital identity, payments, and data exchange are increasingly recognized as foundational public infrastructure, and international frameworks for digital public infrastructure call for systems that are inclusive, transparent, accountable, and rights-respecting. This briefing sets out where Ethereum already performs these functions in production, the independent evidence for its reliability, and the technical mechanisms that reconcile public-network deployment with regulatory obligations.
Digital public infrastructure requires credible neutrality
Governments worldwide are investing in digital public infrastructure. International safeguards guidance for DPI identifies the risks that accompany this investment: privacy vulnerabilities, digital exclusion, cybersecurity threats, institutional weakness, and erosion of public trust.
Many of these risks share a common structural cause. Where infrastructure depends on a single operator — a vendor, a platform, or a foreign service provider — that operator becomes a single point of failure and a single point of control. Recent years have seen cloud outages interrupt government services, payment systems restricted across borders, and identity providers breached at national scale. An operator under commercial or geopolitical pressure can alter terms, restrict access, or withdraw service, regardless of the agreements in place.
Credibly neutral infrastructure addresses this cause directly: the rules are enforced by the protocol itself rather than by the discretion of any party. Deploying on Ethereum introduces no new counterparty. No entity — including the Ethereum Foundation — can restrict access to the network, reorder its priorities for commercial advantage, or discontinue it. For a government, this preserves sovereignty over its own systems while enabling interoperability with others.
The practical aim is civic infrastructure that resolves a long-standing trilemma — at once resilient against technical, social, and political threats, respectful of personal autonomy, and economically competitive. Recent technical developments make it possible to satisfy all three at the same time rather than trading one off against another.
Independent assessment
Blockchain networks differ fundamentally in architecture and governance. Some operate as open public infrastructure; others are, in effect, corporate products whose insiders set the rules. The distinction determines whether a network can serve as public infrastructure for decades. The figures below are drawn from OpenZeppelin's comparative technical risk assessment of layer 1 networks, cited in the Ethereum Foundation's institutional report; data as of March 2026 unless stated otherwise.
Continuous operation since launch in 2015. Every other network assessed recorded between one and seven outages in the same period.
In staked ETH securing consensus. Finalizing a fraudulent transaction is estimated to cost approximately $50.7B, with automatic on-chain penalties in addition.
Independent client implementations, developed by separate teams in different programming languages. No single software defect can halt the network.
Validator distribution across continents and legal jurisdictions, with no single country hosting a dominant share. Participation requires only consumer-grade hardware.
Active developers across the EVM ecosystem — the deepest base of tooling, audit firms, and compliance providers of any blockchain platform.
Operating entities. Network integrity does not depend on the solvency or conduct of any company. On one comparable network, a single corporation controls roughly 42% of token supply.
Alignment with DPI safeguards
The central question for any public infrastructure is whether it protects the people who depend on it: their privacy, their access, and their recourse. Ethereum's development is anchored in four properties, published in the Ethereum Foundation Mandate (March 2026), that address these questions at the protocol level. An abbreviated briefing sets out how these principles are applied to public infrastructure: individuals retain consent over their identities, assets, and actions, while institutions gain credible alternatives to vendor lock-in, foreign dependencies, and unauditable closed systems — both at once, built on open source.
Censorship resistant
No operator, vendor, or external actor can selectively exclude participants or transactions. Access is a property of the protocol, not a policy of a provider.
Open source
Every layer is publicly inspectable and reusable without licence fees. Procurement is not bound to any vendor, and exit paths remain credible throughout the system's life.
Private
Confidentiality for institutions and individuals, with selective disclosure to regulators — consistent with internationally recognized privacy and data-protection standards.
Secure
A decade of continuous operation, economic security in the tens of billions of dollars, and a post-quantum migration roadmap within the core protocol.
Two further principles guide institutional deployment design:
- Continuity independent of any single party. A well-designed deployment continues to function if the original vendor, integrator, or the Ethereum Foundation itself ceases to participate. Institutions and citizens retain their records, assets, and verification capabilities.
- Protection calibrated to the relationship. Institution-to-institution systems, such as interbank settlement, involve counterparties of comparable standing. Institution-to-citizen systems do not, and are therefore designed so that the architecture itself protects the individual — consistent with established principles of accountability and redress.
The measure of success is simple: individuals are genuinely freer and more respected than they would otherwise have been, and institutions come to see resilience and user sovereignty as the mark of serious institutional practice.
In production today
Across the three core DPI functions — identity, payments, and data exchange — and in regulated financial markets, Ethereum is in production use by national governments, city administrations, international development organizations, and globally systemic financial institutions.
Kingdom of Bhutan — national digital identity
Bhutan is the first country to anchor a nationwide identity framework on a public blockchain. Verifiable credentials are anchored to Ethereum for tamper-evident verification, while personal data remains off-chain under citizen control — a self-sovereign design consistent with data-protection safeguards.
Status: migration completed early 2026 · source ↗
City of Buenos Aires — QuarkID
Buenos Aires issues self-sovereign digital credentials to residents through QuarkID, applying zero-knowledge cryptography anchored to Ethereum. Residents determine what information they disclose, and verification does not depend on the availability of a government API.
Scale: available to approximately 3.6 million residents · source ↗
India — land registries
Authorities in India are piloting Ethereum-anchored land registries to strengthen the integrity of property records, reduce fraud, and simplify transfers. Registries are a natural application of tamper-evident public infrastructure, where record integrity underpins both markets and citizens' rights.
Status: active pilots, cited in the Ethereum Foundation institutional report (2026) · source ↗
Stablecoin settlement
Ethereum mainnet is the primary settlement layer for fiat-referenced stablecoins, used for cross-border payments, corporate treasury operations, and humanitarian disbursement where conventional banking rails are slow, costly, or unavailable.
Scale: approximately $180B on mainnet — about 60% of global stablecoin supply (mid-2026) · source ↗
Tokenized funds and government securities
BlackRock (BUIDL, over $2.5B under management), Franklin Templeton (BENJI, approximately $2B), and Fidelity operate tokenized money-market and treasury funds on Ethereum infrastructure. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries grew from roughly $2B to $9B in eighteen months; Ethereum accounts for about two-thirds of all tokenized real-world assets.
Trend: the tokenized asset market grew from ~$5.5B (early 2025) to ~$30B (mid-2026) across all networks · source ↗
JPMorgan — Kinexys
JPMorgan's Kinexys platform has processed more than $1.5 trillion in cumulative transaction volume. The bank launched its first tokenized fund on Ethereum in December 2025 and filed for a second in 2026 — regulated banking products settling on public infrastructure under existing supervisory frameworks.
Context: Ethereum Institutional, an independent non-profit, launched in July 2026 as a neutral point of contact for banks and asset managers · source ↗
UNICEF CryptoFund
UNICEF operates a pooled fund of ether and bitcoin that receives, holds, and disburses cryptocurrency directly — the first such vehicle among major international organizations. It provides equity-free investments of up to US$100,000 in ETH, BTC, or USDC to open-source startups in developing and emerging economies, with disbursements traceable on-chain from donor to recipient.
Track record: investments across dozens of startups in low- and middle-income countries since 2019; new blockchain cohorts continuing in 2026 · source ↗
Giga — school connectivity
Giga, the UNICEF–ITU initiative working to connect every school to the internet, uses Ethereum in two ways: schools report connectivity measurements to a public chain for transparent, verifiable monitoring, and an impact-staking model lets donors direct Ethereum staking rewards to connectivity financing while retaining their principal — demonstrated with the Government of Rwanda.
Scale: engaged in 39 countries; Rwanda proof of concept financed school connectivity through staking rewards · source ↗
Xcapit AidLink — humanitarian cash transfers
AidLink, built by UNICEF Venture Fund portfolio company Xcapit with partners in Nepal and Kenya, delivers humanitarian cash transfers over blockchain rails — including an SMS-based wallet that operates on basic phones without internet access. A pilot in Cusco, Peru reached 270 beneficiaries; a second in Nairobi (December 2025) delivered USDC to recipients who converted it to local currency through M-Pesa.
Design: open source, multichain including Ethereum; built for low-connectivity environments and local-language support · source ↗
Meeting institutional requirements on public infrastructure
Institutional deployment carries specific requirements: confidentiality with scoped regulatory access, atomic settlement, verifiable credentials, and freedom from vendor dependency. Each maps to established, openly documented Ethereum standards and techniques.
| Mechanism | What it provides | Requirement addressed |
|---|---|---|
| ERC-7573 | Conditional, atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement (DvP/PvP) | Settlement between cash and assets without counterparty risk |
| Viewing keys | Read-only access to encrypted records, with access logging | Scoped supervisory and audit visibility over otherwise confidential transactions |
| Attestations | Cryptographic claims verifiable without recourse to the issuer's systems | Credential and compliance verification that survives vendor failure |
| Zero-knowledge proofs | Proof of a fact — age, solvency, eligibility — without disclosure of underlying data | Privacy-preserving identity, eligibility, and reporting; no personal data on-chain |
| Stealth addresses | Single-use addresses that prevent linkage of a party's transactions | Payment confidentiality toward non-participants |
The prevailing design principle: transaction amounts, counterparties, and workflow metadata are concealed from non-participants; the existence of transactions, contract code, and credential schemas remain public and auditable; regulators receive scoped access through viewing keys and attestations. These mechanisms are designed to satisfy KYC, AML, sanctions, and record-keeping obligations on public infrastructure — not to circumvent them.
Areas under active development
The deployments above rest on foundations that extend to a broader set of public-sector and institutional applications now moving from design to pilot:
- Confidential institutional settlement. Bonds, repurchase agreements, foreign exchange, and money-market instruments settling atomically on public infrastructure with visibility restricted to stakeholders and supervisors.
- Sovereign digital currency infrastructure. The confidentiality mechanisms developed for stablecoins apply equally to central bank digital currencies and tokenized deposits, in jurisdictions pursuing those instruments.
- Resilient service delivery. Disbursement systems, identity continuity, and civic records designed to remain operational through conflict, natural disaster, or infrastructure failure — a core concern for any state investing in digital public infrastructure.
- Registries, procurement, and supply chains. Provenance, attestation, and record-integrity systems for processes in which multiple parties must coordinate without a single trusted intermediary.
- Post-quantum security. A migration roadmap within the core protocol, supported by a dedicated research programme — relevant to any infrastructure intended to operate for decades.
Institutions evaluating this field face two related decisions: which neutral infrastructure to adopt for coordination with other parties while preserving their own sovereignty, and how to regulate a category of infrastructure that has no controlling entity. The evidence and resources assembled here are intended to inform both.
Exploring Ethereum for your institution
The Ethereum Foundation's Ethereum for Public Infrastructure and Commons (EPIC) team works with governments, multilateral institutions, public agencies, NGOs, and civil society evaluating Ethereum as digital public infrastructure — from briefings and workshops on sovereign infrastructure design, through high-level architecture sense-checking, to incubating pilots and making introductions to aligned development teams in the wider ecosystem.
Engagement is advisory and vendor-neutral: the Foundation sells nothing and holds no commercial stake in deployment decisions. It also places deliberate limits on its own role — no turn-key products, no certification of projects, no open-ended technical support — because the goal is institutional capability without dependency on any single actor, the Foundation included.
To arrange a briefing or discuss a specific use case, contact the institutional team.
Primary resources
Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions
The Ethereum Foundation's non-technical primer for public-sector and institutional leaders: how Ethereum works, how it is governed, how it compares with alternatives, and where it is deployed. Published July 2026.
The Ethereum Foundation Mandate
The Foundation's constitutional document: its role as one steward among many, the four protocol properties, and its commitment to reducing its own influence over time. An abbreviated briefing sets out how the Ethereum for Public Infrastructure and Commons (EPIC) team applies the Mandate — what it supports, what it deliberately does not, and who it works with.
Why neutral infrastructure matters now
The Ethereum Foundation's introduction to the institutional report, including the comparative technical assessment of layer 1 networks.
Map explorer
An interactive map of GovTech and digital public infrastructure domains where Ethereum can be applied — taxonomy, relationships, prior experiments, and opportunities.