UNICEF on-chain, from pilots to institutional adoption

Transcript

Hello. Cool. Yeah so I'm I'm Arun. I'm the blockchain lead at UNICEF Office of Innovation. So today I'll be giving you guys an overview of what we are doing and then also talk a little bit about what institutionalization or institutional adoption means for us. So for those who don't know, UNICEF is a UN agency whose mandate is to improve the lives of children. So we are pretty old since 1946. We operate in almost every country in the world.

We have the world's largest humanitarian warehouse. We are the largest provider of vaccines and we work in a whole lot of different areas, right? And many people know this, but then many people come and ask us what the hell are we doing in blockchain? Why are you doing blockchain? So our main wise I can say are first is the redistribution of resources. The F in UNICEF stands for fund, which we have been doing for decades, which is we receive funding and then we allocate it and then we create impact and then we report it.

So it it it involves a lot of the movement of money cross-border across the globe in the 190 countries. So digital assets in our opinion is a new better faster cheaper more transparent way of redistribution of said resources. And UNICEF is in its very nature being in 190 countries, very distributed and very decentralized an organization. So by default, we believe that blockchain technologies when applied properly to processes can help us improve our efficiency and effectiveness.

And lastly, we are a huge fan of open source and digital public goods and we want to use this tech to incentivize the creation of more open source and digital public goods. And how do we do it? We firstly raise and disburse cryptocurrency. I'll talk more about that. We work with startups. We fund and accelerate startups and then we do our own building at what is the cutting edge for us? Maybe not for the rest of the industry, but for us, it's definitely cutting edge. So coming to the first point, raising and dispersing crypto. So UNICEF Crypto Fund is the main vehicle for that. It's been around since 2019. It's the first and still the only mechanism within the UN to operate

purely in crypto. What do we mean by purely? So we don't on ramp, we don't off ramp basically. So we fund raise in in crypto mostly ETH and Bitcoin since December 2025 also in USDC. We hold it and then we make payments with it to the to the to the startups who we accelerate or to vendors. And we have accumulated a decent amount of experience in working with digital assets. And through the crypto fund, we have disbursed almost $4.2 million to over 40 projects.

Now, how do we work with startups? So that's through a mechanism called the UNICEF Venture Fund. And we operate in the top right corner of this quadrant. So how do we apply new technologies to known problems or because of new technologies, how do we enter new areas of work that make sense for UNICEF? Of course, with using technologies that are billion dollar industries. So naturally we ended up in in AI and blockchain as the primary mainstays of our, you know, technical focus.

The UNICEF Venture Fund has accelerated startups and we also provide funding for UNICEF country offices, which are basically offices where fieldwork happens. So that's sort of our footprint and this this is about over the last 10 years of inactivity. When it comes to startups, we prefer female funded startups, female founders and as well as we create digital public goods from these startups. So that's some stats there for you guys. Blockchain.

So we have funded an accelerated quite a few blockchain startups, about 20 or 23 and there's a whole lot of numbers on the slide, but the main takeaway is doing good with blockchain, creating open source digital public goods need not be divorced from making money, from raising funding. So many of our startups have gone on to raise millions. They've generated revenue in millions and some have even got acquired. So our thesis is to work with private sector companies. We don't work with NGOs. We want the companies to make money at the same time create open source digital public goods and and and and and create good business models as well.

Some examples. So we have worked with a startup called Statwig from India and they built a product called Vaccine Ledger, which is now a digital public good for end-to-end supply chain tracking using blockchain. And they have some super cool features like a cold chain tracking, etc. And it has been adopted by the Bangladesh government, the Ministry of Health through of course UNICEF Bangladesh and it's been deployed nationwide in 2025, I think.

I have another slide which which shows the journey, but this is a very very cool cool piece of piece of work. Then BX Smart Labs is another startup from Mexico that we have worked with. So they created on-chain coordination of saving circles, roscas or chit funds as it is called. It's you know very important for UNICEF because we work with a lot of youth and adolescents who are organized as saving circles. And the BX Smart Labs modified a version of their code to apply in UNICEF Burundi.

The photo that you see is is a real photo of know people that we that we that we work with. So these are out of work adolescence who are organized in you know saving circles. They use those metal boxes where they throw in cash so we basically took all of the transactions on chain and then we ended up creating a sort of a credit history for these groups of out of work adolescence with the hope of the credit history helping them obtain further loans from local micro credit credit organizations and these are small sums like I've met some of these people.

Entrepreneurship for them is like opening opening a hair salon like a barber shop or buying a chicken and selling the eggs and stuff like that. So we are not talking of huge amounts of money but in Burundi even $100 makes a huge difference in the in the in the lives of these people. Then this is one of my recent favorites. So three of our startups came together and collaborated to build something called Aid Link. So this is for dispersing stable coins in humanitarian aid to places without internet and to people who don't have internet access.

So the stacks are Rumsan is a company from Nepal. They built a stack for beneficiary management and they had nosis safe and then back end. Excapit built an SMS wallet and then Kotani pay built in built an off ramp. So all of them came together and we sent USDC to people in Kenya with no internet access. So they had feature phones. Okay the the photograph shows a smartphone but it can work with feature phones as well. They got trained for for an hour or two. They received USDC and then they immediately off ramp to M Pesa right there. Everything happened within a within a few few hours and and and and this sort of shows the potential of how we can apply this technology to

help the most vulnerable people and and is also is a sign of how we think of of application of frontier frontier frontier Tech. Now to introduce three new startups that we will be working with next year. So this is our cohort from 2026. Cartagena from Colombia. They're doing some work on privacy and we want to apply that in humanitarian aid to create private transactions. Cladify works with microcredit and digital identifiers. We hope for more financial inclusion through them. And then Varunastra from India works with creating proof of stuff that happens on

the ground, which we hope to then inject into other workflows. So we are super excited to be working with these three. Now the the third area, which is the building and prototyping area, that's the Frontier Tech team. I'll be taking you through a bunch of experiments. So these are just like experiments that we have done with the main intent to learn and then to see how else, what else we can do with it. So we ran a DAO for an entire year in the in the scope of a software project.

So the DAO was not not not not not a complicated DAO. You know, your your typical protocol DAO. So there's off-chain voting. I mean, we gather the community off-chain voting on proposals and where to take the software next, which features to build etc. And then there were there were people who were contributing code. And and yeah, so the hope was to do an experiment on digital resilience, right? So technical resilience in in the sense of for open source digital public goods. Of course, there will be one or two primary contributors, but you never know how long they will last. So can we become technically resilient by working with more people, more contributors, right? And then can we

become more can we create a better product market fit by inviting discussion with community so that the features can be adapted accordingly. And of course, the financial resilience is, you know, obvious with digital assets, the potential of using digital assets to make payments. Then we worked with partner launch nodes who made a staking pool through Lido impact staking so people can stake their ETH and give a bit of their yield to the UNICEF venture fund. So it's almost like passive income. This was a cool experiment. If any of you want to take a bit of ETH for us, please look for look for this project. We'll be very very happy

with your help. We tried Gitcoin quadratic funding and we raised about 100k for DPGs. This was quite quite successful. This happened in 2022. This is something that I'm reasonably excited by. So we work with a company called Karma. They built a product called GAP, Grantee Accountability Protocol. I believe they've rebranded now. They don't call it GAP anymore. But under underneath everything there is the Ethereum attestation service. So the startups that we work with, the ones that I spoke about, some of them have started reporting their milestones on chain and then providing proof of reaching milestones on chain and then UNICEF goes in and attests it on chain thereby creating an

on chain reputation and then they can go on to for the fundraiser and then we can show transparently the work that the startups have been doing. And and this is very very important building block for us and I have a slide on this later. I'll I'll get into more details on that later. Then one cool project that we did is to create a drip list. For those who don't know, drips is splitting contract completely on chain. You can stream funds, but more importantly, the recipient of the of the funds don't even need to have a wallet to start with.

They just need to have a GitHub repo. So it's built for open source digital public goods to sort of interface with each other just like how APIs call each other. The idea is to make the money also flow just how APIs depend on each other Like the software supply chain essentially should sort of mirror the financial supply chain of open source and digital public goods. So we did a first pilot to see how this works and then we have hopes on building from this base going forward.

Now institutionalization, that's a word that's been thrown around quite a bit in 2026 especially. But what can this mean for UNICEF? So I just like randomly looked online and I found these news articles which talk about institutionalization, but most of it talk around float around crypto. They talk about regulation, they talk of stable coins reaching that inflection point etc etc. But this is one point of view, how the industry talks about it.

But for UNICEF we look at it slightly differently. These are some foundational workflows as I as I call them, which is basically what we do as a organization, as a UN organization. And also many of this is quite common. I mean these are this is not rocket science. It's just pretty much what we do, right? Like research, planning, partnerships, distribution, which would be your supply chain, reporting, measurement etc. So we believe that institutionalization of blockchain and crypto for an organization such as us is basically this.

Like if we can apply the technology to improve the efficiencies and enhance outcomes of these workflows and also strengthen global alignment for our mandate, which is everything to do with kids, right? So can we do that? Can we get blockchain and crypto at a foundational level into these workflows, right? So not just a customer facing, user facing app, but more at the back end, at the bottom, at the invisible, non-sexy back end. And can we like improve, improve what we what we do? So, how can this look like? So, this is sort of a bit speculative, but please bear

with me. So, if we take distribution as foundational workflow, so that would be supply chains. I already spoke about this product, vaccine ledger, which was built by Statwig. We gave them two rounds of funding, so we incubated them. So, over a four-year period, they built a solid digital public good, which became reasonably mature. Why did we do this? Because we are the world's biggest buyer and a mover of vaccines. Basically, it's super critical for, you know, kids and and and this is a really a core part of what we do. So, that's why we were interested in this startup in the first place.

And then I already mentioned this. In 2025, it was adopted by the government of Bangladesh. So, it's already a six-year period. You can see, right? Like a startup to reach maturity, to to get the right guidance from experts in UNICEF, especially in the field of health immunization, to build a product, to make it open source, and then to get it adopted by a government, one government took a while. And then the institutional pathway would be to scale it across other governments and to also attempt to get it into the foundational, let's say, software substrate that is used for a supply chain at track and trace of

vaccines. So, that can happen in the future. Now, if we look at funding of digital public goods, I already mentioned these experiments that we that we did. Why do we do it? Because we believe digital public goods is super critical for digital for the solving the problem of digital inequality, inclusion, resilience, digital digital resilience, etc. So that's the underlying reason why the secretary general spoke about it a few years ago.

And what can we do? So with these individual experiments, what if we combine all of them together and then and also with other mechanisms that the web three world comes up with for the funding of digital public goods. We put them together and then we create a source of evergreen funding for for digital public goods. Potentially we can add governance and an allocation mechanism to it and now you have the money going and and this is a work in progress. Now the institutionalization would look like actual adoption of these digital public goods, actual deployment by public sector entities, by UN agencies, by

governments by other NGOs, etc. And the mode here is no more making of software. I think that is solved forever probably. The mode is going to be deployment and adoption. So can the funding that the web three ecosystem provides in an evergreen passive income continuous sort of way hopefully be directed to the deployment of said digital public goods. So this is one way in which institutionalization can look like right?

Then reporting and accountability. So UNICEF is organization that runs by funding provided by governments and we raise our own funds. We are of course publicly accountable. I spoke of the experiment we did with Karma which has Ethereum attestation service and then a back end. So we have been running this for almost a year now and we are learning from it. Why are we doing it? That's kind of obvious. It's you know super critical for us to be accountable. With the UNICEF crypto fund, we have already seen how we can publish hashes of transactions on chain and then we literally show exactly what we do with our money, where it comes from, where

it's going. So all of that is is in a public. You can just Google for it. Can we extend that to what we do? Like not just money, but also the actions that we take and eventually can we combine combine combine the two, right? So it's a it's a crucial stepping stone. So that's the fundamental why we we know worked with Karma to just check how this thing works. Now the pathway to institutional institutionalization from startups declaring their milestones, can we find a sort of a small corner of UNICEF like our own processes where we can declare what we are doing. We can submit proof and then we allow

the ecosystem to attest what UNICEF has done, for example. By the way, I I just used the language of the Ethereum attestation service, but there could be other mechanisms as well that we can put that we can potentially work with. So if such a pilot happens in the future and if this is successful, I can imagine further integration into our foundational measurement and evaluation systems or enterprise systems that we know work with and then eventually this transforming to some sort of public dashboards where the AI can create narratives, but ultimately the trust anchor is on chain and as you can see, this is not just for UNICEF, but pretty much for

anybody in this sector. Yeah. So that's all I have for you. You can learn more about the venture fund and crypto fund here and about the experiments and pilots that we do in the Frontier Tech team over there. Thank you so much. >> Okay, thank you, Aaron. That's really interesting. The the the audience has been submitting questions for the last 20 minutes and we've got them curated on on screen.

We'll jump into the first one. You So, you talk a lot about how UNICEF are working pretty closely with Ethereum. Uh, the question is around whether you're running kind of underlying infrastructure and staking your ETH and running validators, uh, whether that's something UNICEF are doing or would consider doing. >> We have considered doing it, but we are not doing it yet. >> Okay. >> But we would really like to do it at some point, um, and and many of the things that we do, we need some internal approvals across the board.

So, if we are running validators, for example, then we'll be sort of generating our own crypto. So, we might need to get some approvals and all that. So. >> Right. That's great to hear. Uh, okay. So, the next question is You I think you alluded to a little bit. You mentioned safes, but can you tell us more about the broader setup at UNICEF, how you how you manage funds, which wallet, and do you keep it in exchange or do you self-custody and multisig setups, that kind of thing? >> So, I get this question a lot. I'm actually not supposed to answer this, because for security reasons, but you can be rest assured that we use like battle-tested approaches, battle-tested code, and all of that, and we don't complicate

things. So, we keep keep it keep it simple and it all works well so far. It's been seven years without any any you know, unpleasant surprises. >> Okay. Thank you. So, the next question Um, it's about what what drove UNICEF's success in raising substantial funding through crypto? Did brand recognition simply unlock an additional funding channel or was there a a deeper strategy at play? >> That's a great question. Um, so the crypto fund has been existing since 2019, but the Office of Innovation or at that time I I believe it was called the Innovation

Unit, they started working with blockchains since 2015 even before Ethereum existed. So I believe the people at UNICEF recognized the importance of blockchain, Web 3 and decentralization even before Ethereum existed and we started experimenting with it. So four years on when the Office of Innovation approached Ethereum Foundation for the for the proposal to partner for the crypto fund it wasn't just the brand. It was also a deeper understanding of the technology through hands-on experimentation

and in that sense we are very much like a kind of a startup. Yeah. So we get our hands dirty and and we kind of know what we are talking about. I believe that's the answer. Yeah. >> Okay and then so then picking up on the title from the previous talk about about engaging non-technical users interested to know how do you manage wallets for non-technical users? How does that work? >> So in the pilot that we did with Karma the users who were attesting on chain were some of them were not very technical.

Like like we had a business model mentor for example, right? So Karma solved it through using of Privi. So email based wallets and we found that approach to be good. And so we'll probably explore more of that if we are building some stacks of our own where we want non-technical users to perform on-chain activity. >> Okay the next next one's an interesting one around kind of how how you see working with sort of corporate institutions versus sort of public permissionless blockchain. So do do you see any conflicts happening when you're you're you're working directly with

for-profit entities but you're also at the same time encouraging them to share their work and share their code that technically their competitors could just could just take. >> So we believe that business models should be possible for open source and for digital public goods. So the for-profit startups that we work with some of them have truly dedicated their life to the mission of open source and digital public goods, but some of them do have other product lines which make money, right? So, the financial sustainability of the startups that we work with

is something that we guide them on. And the idea of open source and digital public goods being sort of a loss of competitiveness is is, I think, not what we think it should be like. I mean, not every piece of code is, let's say, qualified to be a digital public good, but only if it, like, really helps the community at at large, right? So, some of the criteria that we work with: we need the startups that we work with to align with the the SDGs, for example.

There are some UNICEF internal principles, so after those filters is when we decide to work with startups, and then the DPGs that they create naturally align with what a DPG should be, and we have