Bhutan's National Digital Identity — Self-Sovereign ID Reaching 70% of Citizens

Bhutan's National Digital Identity (NDI) is the Royal Government's self-sovereign digital identity system, piloted in February 2023 when Crown Prince Jigyel Ugyen Wangchuck became the first citizen to enrol, and launched nationally in October 2023. Run with the Department of Civil Registration and Census, it lets citizens hold verifiable credentials in a digital wallet, authenticated through facial biometric matching.
By 2025, more than 70% of Bhutan's population had completed biometric enrolment, with over 230,000 active users on the platform. NDI was built on Hyperledger Indy, migrated to the Polygon blockchain in 2024, and began integrating with Ethereum in 2025; a 2025 upgrade added facial liveness detection and peer-to-peer chat. The programme was featured at the World Bank's Global Digital Summit in March 2025.
NDI's documentation states biometric images are not permanently stored, an architecture choice aimed at privacy, though no independent security audit was found in public reporting. The programme also describes its use of AI as still narrow — largely confined to facial liveness and matching — and says it has 'just begun planning' a broader AI layer, so it should be read as an emerging rather than mature AI application.

Read the full analysis: https://trustoverip.org/wp-content/uploads/Case-Study-Bhutan-NDI-National-Digital-Identity-ToIP-Digital-Trust-Ecosystems-V1.0-2024-05-21.ext_.pdf