Blockchain Impact Framework for UN Development

Over the past six months, I've had the privilege of leading a project that sits at the intersection of two worlds that have animated my work for decades: trust‑building in crisis and technology as a tool for making sustainable impact. From organising anarcho‑punk collectives in wartime Croatia – where we had to create solidarity amid chaos with nothing but conviction and improvisation – to leading blockchain initiatives across UNDP's Alternative Finance Lab(opens in a new tab), I've always believed the same principle: when communities have agency and can verify outcomes together, systems become more resilient and fair.

This project, born from the Ethereum Foundation's Next Billion Fellowship, has crystallised that belief into a practical, scalable framework. We set out to answer a simple but urgent question: How can we bridge Ethereum innovation with the UN's development mandate, moving beyond limited pilots toward verifiable, scalable impact?

Introduction: From Punk Collectives to UN Boardrooms

I'll be honest—the journey to this moment was anything but linear (as life generally isn't). In the 1990s, as bombs fell across Croatia and in the post-war period, I was part of small circles of people trying to create spaces of resistance and care through music, DIY culture, and radical solidarity. We had no budget, no formal structure, just deep mutual trust and a shared conviction that another way was possible. Over 25 years, I channeled that ethic into social entrepreneurship and impact work across Europe and the Middle East - launching innovative capacity-building programs, impact acceleration programs, alternative finance mechanisms, designing impact measurement systems, building coalitions between governments, civil society organisations, communities, and funders and investors. The thread running through it all was the same: How do we create systems where trust is distributed, not concentrated? Where communities see the results of their engagement? Where power isn't hidden in black boxes?

When I joined UNDP's AltFinLab, I began exploring blockchain not as hype, but as a trust technology - a way to anchor coordination and transparency in systems where institutional actors have conflicting incentives. Over the past three decades, I learned that sustainable impact requires both conviction and credibility. And credibility, in the development world, means evidence: comparable data, auditable outcomes, and frameworks that both builders and institutions can trust.

This six-month Next Billion Fellowship was the opportunity to formalise that insight. We set out to map Ethereum-based projects across the UN ecosystem and develop a practical impact framework to bridge blockchain innovation with institutional development needs - not as another experiment, but as a foundation for scaling verified, replicable solutions.

The Fellowship Context and Core Crisis

The Next Billion Fellowship resonated deeply because it articulated something I'd been grappling with for years: Ethereum as infrastructure for trust, coordination, and empowerment - especially for the next billion users, many of whom are in developing contexts where institutional trust is fragile or absent. The Fellowship's framing was clear: Ethereum's core affordances - decentralisation, transparency, composability - could unlock new pathways for financial inclusion, digital identity, and governance.

But here's the harder truth we confronted early on: the UN-Web3 space is graveyard-adjacent. Over the past decade, countless blockchain pilots within UN agencies have stalled, scaled minimally, or been quietly archived. The crisis is real and multifaceted:

• Builders lack credible metrics: Ethereum-based projects pitch solutions to UN agencies, but struggle to speak UN language - concrete SDG contribution, UN impact measurement frameworks and standards, comparative risk analysis. Result: skepticism, repeated pilots.
• UN agencies lack verifiable blockchain outcomes: Decision-makers in humanitarian and development agencies want to see blockchain's added value, not just its existence. They ask harder questions: Why blockchain over a database? Does this actually reduce cost, speed, or fraud compared to alternatives? Few projects had rigorous answers.
• Pilots repeat mistakes: Lack of coordination means each project rediscovered the same lessons independently - the importance of community buy-in, the need for off-chain support, the reality that technology alone doesn't change behaviour.
• UN agencies lack technical capacity: Many UN teams don't have the in-house skills to implement projects leveraging blockchain's core functionalities (smart contracts, tokenization, decentralized governance), creating dependency on external vendors and limiting long-term sustainability.

The core crisis, distilled, was misalignment and mistrust. Builders were building; UN agencies were evaluating - but they were speaking past each other. An impact framework wasn't luxury; it was essential. Not another framework that tells people what to measure, but one that bridges both ecosystems - helping Ethereum projects design for institutional credibility, and helping UN agencies understand when and how blockchain adds real value.

Main Project Phases and Key Deliverables

The fellowship unfolded in four distinct phases, each with concrete outputs designed to progressively build evidence and credibility.

Phase 1: Mapping Ethereum Across the UN Ecosystem

We started where most projects should: understanding the landscape. Desktop research, structured interviews, and validation with UN Digital Solutions Center, UN Innovation Network databases, and Ethereum Foundation directories gave us a comprehensive view. The output: a curated dataset of 51 verified Ethereum and EVM-compatible projects across the UN system(opens in a new tab), broken down by blockchain domains (financial inclusion, governance, supply chain, digital identity, and climate action).

Permissioned and hybrid blockchains dominated - because data protection and regulatory compliance matter more than decentralised hype. Public-private partnerships were the modal governance form (>90% of initiatives). Africa led geographic distribution (47.6% of projects), but coverage gaps existed in Central Asia. Crucially, impact measurement was inconsistent: while 60%+ tracked KPIs, methodologies were idiosyncratic and rarely made clear connections and contributions to specific SDG indicators.

Key deliverable: a detailed mapping database with sectoral breakdowns and 11 use cases shortlisted for deeper analysis. This wasn't a list - it was a knowledge commons, designed for replication and comparative analysis.

Phase 2: Deep Dives into High-Impact Projects & Impact Stories

We selected 11 high-priority projects and assessed them rigorously using weighted scoring across feasibility, viability, and desirability, with explicit risk ratings for legal, technical, and adoption barriers. The assessment was not academic - it directly informed which projects we'd develop into compelling impact stories.

We then worked with five standout projects to craft narratives that bridged both worlds:

1. Bloinx:(opens in a new tab) Community savings circles on Ethereum, transforming tandas (rotating savings groups) in Latin America and Burundi by making them transparent, digital, and cross-border.
2. Rahat:(opens in a new tab) Nepal's blockchain cash-transfer platform, cutting disbursement time from weeks to minutes.
3. Blue Circle:(opens in a new tab) Marine waste collection in China tracked end-to-end on Ethereum—from fishermen collecting nets to recycled pellets on shelves.
4. ITCILO Digital Credentials:(opens in a new tab) 208,000+ blockchain-verified training certificates issued since 2020, enabling instant, global verification.
5. Building Blocks:(opens in a new tab) WFP's humanitarian blockchain network coordinating assistance across 80+ partners in Ukraine, reaching 6 million people, preventing $270 million in duplicate aid.

Each impact story went beyond outputs - it captured causality, beneficiary agency, and institutional learning. We used mixed methods: interviews, on-chain data, independent evaluations, qualitative feedback, and honest reflection on what blockchain added versus what it didn't.

Phase 3: Framework Design and External Validation

This was the intellectual heart of the work. We audited existing UN frameworks - UNDP's SDG Impact Standards, UN Impact Measurement & Management (IMM), Result-Based Management (RBM) - and synthesised them with emerging Web3-native approaches (quadratic funding, impact tokens, hypercerts, retroactive public goods funding, etc.). The final result: the Ethereum × UN Impact Framework, structured based on multiple complementary documents:

• Insights from Impact Frameworks - PART I: UN-aligned evaluation approaches(opens in a new tab) – the document synthesises established methods like Theory of Change, Log-frame, Outcome Harvesting, Contribution Analysis, human-centred methods, and Developmental Evaluation into a coherent ETH × UN impact logic. The key insight is that blockchain systems generate technical outputs (transactions, attestations, proofs), but meaningful impact emerges from behavioural, institutional, and social changes off-chain, so the document proposes a dual-layer causal pathway that holds both layers accountable.
• Insights from Impact Frameworks - PART II: External Guidelines & Frameworks(opens in a new tab) - this document complements UN approaches by introducing new evidence types (real-time, cryptographic, machine-verifiable), new causal pathways (incentive-aligned, participatory, emergent), and new governance forms (decentralised, composable, multi-actor ecosystems). This document distills when blockchain is justified, how to design for regulatory and technical readiness, and how to assess multidimensional externalities, resulting in a governance-first design heuristic where impact depends not only on what a system does, but on who controls it, under which incentives, and with what environmental and inclusion trade-offs.
• Stories of Impact - Part I: Web3 Blockchain-enabled Impact Stories(opens in a new tab) - the Web3 impact stories report showcases concrete cases like EthicHub, Giveth, GainForest, and Octant to illustrate how blockchain can enable new funding models, transparent value flows, and regenerative finance while grappling with hard questions of impact attribution and evaluation. It uses detailed narratives - covering mission, mechanisms, metrics, and governance - to surface design patterns and pitfalls, turning scattered project experiences into reusable lessons for impact delivery, measurement, and funding in Ethereum-based ecosystems.
• Stories of Impact - Part II: Turning Narratives into Lessons & Frameworks(opens in a new tab) - this document takes the narrative case studies and abstracts them into design guidelines for blockchain-enabled impact frameworks, emphasising early integration of impact planning, combining on-chain transparency with off-chain data, and incentivising credible reporting. It argues for context-sensitive metrics, thoughtful governance design, mixed funding modalities, and non-crypto-native-friendly UX, positioning these lessons as a practical bridge between inspiring stories and a structured, adaptable Ethereum × UN impact framework.

Two key documents then pulled all the strands together into a concrete, reusable architecture:

• The ETH × UN Impact Framework(opens in a new tab) is the main output of this phase: a three-layer, ESEG-based measurement model (Environmental, Social, Economic, Governance) that synthesises the UN-aligned methodologies, Web3-native guidelines, the UN mapping, and the impact stories into a modular toolkit for Ethereum and UN teams. It operationalises triple-proof verification—on-chain data, off-chain documentation, and community narratives—so that projects can design from day one for comparable SDG-aligned impact, outcome-based funding, and community-led evaluation rather than one-off pilots and vanity metrics.
• Alongside it, the Building Blocks Humanitarian Blockchain Network Impact Framework serves as a concrete example of the ETH × UN model applied in practice for WFP's multi-country network. It uses the same three-layer, four-domain ESEG structure and triple-proof convergence to measure duplication prevention, cost savings, reach, and dignity outcomes for over 6 million people, showing how a permissioned Ethereum-based system can generate credible, community-grounded evidence for coordination, efficiency, and outcome-based humanitarian funding.

We tested the framework through intensive consultations - 11 Ethereum organisations/initiatives and 5 UN and impact management experts reviewed iterations, offering feedback that fundamentally shaped the final version.

Phase 4: Practical Implementation Toolkit and Guidelines

A framework is elegant on paper; usability in the field is another matter. We developed the Ethereum × UN Impact Guideline(opens in a new tab) - a practical, actionable toolkit with:

• Step-by-step design guidance: How to articulate use cases before selecting a blockchain. How to assess the necessity of decentralisation. How to build Theory of Change linking on-chain activities to off-chain outcomes.
• Reusable templates and checklists: SDG mapping templates, risk assessment rubrics, governance layer assessment tools, environmental accounting worksheets.
• Tools for SDK integration: How to embed on-chain metrics (transaction volumes, smart contract states, attestations) into standard M&E reporting. How to triangulate blockchain data with qualitative evidence.
• Implementation examples: Worked examples from the five impact stories showing how to apply the framework in practice.

Key deliverable - comprehensive implementation guideline, designed for practitioners, project teams, and institutional partners, accompanied with a one-pager impact guideline overview.

All outputs are open-source and accessible - the mapping table is a living .csv file, the framework documents are published, and the toolkit is designed for forking and adaptation. We believe in transparency and composability, not lock-in.

Key Learnings, Reflections, and Practical Changes

Walking through this work, several insights emerged - some confirming years of intuition, others surprising.

1. Ethereum solutions already support UN goals. The framework just makes it legible.

Five major use cases we documented - financial inclusion (Bloinx, Rahat), supply chain transparency (Blue Circle), digital credentials (ITCILO), humanitarian coordination (Building Blocks) - contribute directly to SDGs 1 (No Poverty), 2 (Zero Hunger), 5 (Gender Equality), 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), 13 (Climate Action), and 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions). The problem wasn't a lack of solutions; it was a lack of comparable language. Ethereum builders spoke of gas fees and transaction throughput; UN agencies spoke of cost per transaction and beneficiary reach. The framework translates between them.

2. The framework fills specific gaps for all sides.

For UN agencies: The framework provides a decision tree for when blockchain is justified versus when alternatives suffice. It surfaces governance and incentive risks early. It anchors blockchain projects within SDG targets, not as isolated pilots.

For Ethereum builders: The framework legitimises their work. It shows how to structure impact measurement and management from day one, not as an afterthought. It maps their solutions to institutional needs, and offers a pathway to institutional partnerships.

For communities and beneficiaries: Perhaps most importantly, the framework insists on community-led governance, not captured governance. It mandates veto power over metrics and funding influence, ensuring that those most affected shape evaluation.

3. Community-led governance is non-negotiable.

This became the ethical spine of our work. In pilot after pilot - Bloinx in Burundi, Rahat in Nepal, Blue Circle in coastal China - the deepest impact came when communities weren't just beneficiaries, but co-governors. They shaped interface design, set the pace of rollout, and offered course corrections. Metrics and funding shouldn't be imposed by external evaluators; they should be negotiated, with communities holding veto power.

4. Real-world shifts enabled by the framework:

• UN agencies get comparable data: Instead of 50+ different blockchain pilots using 50+ different KPIs, agencies can now compare outcomes using standardised SDG-related indicators. Duplication falls. Institutional learning compounds.
• Builders gain credible pathways to scale: No more one-off pilots. With a shared framework, a successful innovation in one country can be adapted and replicated rigorously in another. Trust builds.
• Communities gain voice and agency: The framework insists that beneficiaries aren't passive recipients of evaluation, but active participants in defining what good outcomes look like.

Open Questions, Risks, and Testing Plan

Honest work requires honesty about uncertainties. Here are the key tests ahead:

Will the "triple-proof" converge at 90% accuracy?

Our framework proposes triple-proof verification: on-chain evidence (transactions, attestations) triangulated with qualitative evidence (interviews, focus groups) and administrative data (program logs, surveys). In theory, this should converge on reliable impact signals. In practice, does it?

Test: pilots in 3–5 agencies across different sectors (humanitarian, financial inclusion, supply chain). Target: 90% convergence across the three proof types within 12 months.

DAO capture risk: Can decentralised governance resist elite capture?

Community-led governance sounds beautiful; practically, it's vulnerable. Capture can happen subtly: when crypto-native participants dominate forums, when token incentives privilege the wealthy, when metrics favour what's easy to measure over what matters.

Safeguard: annual audits of governance participation, with explicit targets for inclusion of non-crypto participants. Fallback: kill-switch if capture indicators cross thresholds.

Regulatory roadblocks: Will jurisdictions allow this?

Some contexts (like Nepal in Rahat's case) restrict public blockchains; permissioned alternatives work but reduce some affordances. Others may prohibit specific features (digital identity on-chain, token incentives, etc.).

Test: pilots in jurisdictions with varying regulatory postures. Fallback: maintain design flexibility so the framework adapts to permissioned blockchains, hybrid approaches, and even non-blockchain digital alternatives when regulation mandates.

Will the framework scale beyond our team?

We've done the hard intellectual work. But institutionalising it - making it native to UN procurement, Ethereum ecosystem funding, Ethereum product development, academic evaluation - requires buy-in we haven't fully secured yet.

Action: v1.0 will prioritise adoption pathways with specific agencies and Ethereum organisations.

Explicit kill-switches: If we hit 3 major failures (pilot abandonments, metric gaming, governance capture without remedy), we pause and redesign rather than scale.

Conclusion and Invitation

This six-month journey has accelerated a longer arc I've been on for years: toward deeper integration between Web3 and Ethereum's innovation and the UN's development mandate, grounded in evidence, community agency, and humility about what technology can and cannot do.

The framework is ready. The stories are told. The toolkit is built. But this is v0.1, and it exists to be tested, critiqued, and remixed by the community it serves.

Join v1.0

This is an invitation, not a conclusion. We're building v1.0 of the framework, and we need you:

• Pilot practitioners: Test the framework in your contexts. Report back what works, what breaks, what we missed. We'll iterate together.
• UN agencies and partners: Use the framework in your evaluations and procurement. Help us understand institutional barriers and opportunities.
• Ethereum builders and community members: Fork the framework. Adapt it to your protocols, your contexts, your communities. Contribute insights back to the registry.
• Impact evaluators and researchers: Critique the methods. Stress-test the assumptions. We want rigorous pushback.

You can reach me at @teopetricevic(opens in a new tab) on Telegram, or @XtXeXo(opens in a new tab) on X.

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All project deliverables, frameworks, impact stories, and implementation guides are available in the GitHub repository(opens in a new tab). The mapping registry is a living document - updated continuously as new initiatives emerge. The impact framework is open-source and designed for adaptation. Join us.

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A Heartfelt Thank You

Deep gratitude to everyone who made this possible:

• To the Ethereum Foundation's Next Billion team: Thank you for trusting us with the space and resources to build rigorously, not hastily.
• To my brilliant core team - Selin Arpaci, Razali Samsudin, Asem Al-Hammadi, and Simon Testot: Your expertise, diverse perspectives, and genuine collegiality transformed an ambition into reality. Selin's rigor, Razali's systems thinking, and Asem & Simon's community mapping made this infinitely stronger. It was an honour.
• To project teams we interviewed (Gabriela/Bloinx, Rumee/Rahat, Ivan/Blue Circle, Eiman/ITCILO, Jessica/Building Blocks, and dozens more): You shared raw struggles and wins that grounded this work in reality.
• To UN colleagues - skeptics and believers alike: Your hard questions, data, and institutional knowledge sharpened everything.
• To beneficiary communities in Nepal, Burundi, coastal China, Turin, and refugee camps: Your stories showed us technology serves human agency, not the reverse.