Pitch decks about blockchain in government keep showing the same few examples: a land registry, a refugee cash programme, a green bond, a bill of lading. What they rarely show is which of these still records transactions or issues securities on a ledger, and which were pilots that ended when the funding did. The two are easy to confuse because the World Bank, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the World Food Programme (WFP), the European Investment Bank (EIB) and national treasuries announce both kinds in the same tone.
This piece sorts them by what the institutions' own dated publications say happened. It covers four areas: aid and cash transfers, land and identity registries, trade documents, and bond issuance. It then sets two sessions from Proof of Talk's archived Paris 2026 programme against what UNDP has published about them.
Aid and cash transfers: the one that kept running
WFP's Building Blocks is the clearest case of a blockchain system that moved from pilot to standing infrastructure. WFP says its first field test took place in January 2017 in Sindh province, Pakistan. According to WFP's project page, updated 13 April 2026, Building Blocks has established operations in Jordan, Bangladesh and Ukraine and is being rolled out in Syria and Palestine, and in 2025, 159 organisations across Ukraine, Syria and Palestine used it. WFP says it has helped avoid USD 288 million in unintended assistance, more than USD 270 million of it in Ukraine, by giving participating agencies a shared record of who has already received what.
WFP states that no names, dates of birth or biometrics are stored anywhere on Building Blocks; recipients are represented by anonymous identifiers. The ledger's job is coordination between agencies, not identity verification, a distinction our piece on proof of personhood explores further.
The wider evidence is thinner. A February 2019 report commissioned by the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation from ODI's Humanitarian Policy Group catalogued distributed ledger uses across the humanitarian sector, from cash programming to land titling, and found that evidence of their impact was elusive. It set out challenges that would have to be overcome before such systems could be scaled safely and effectively.
Land and identity registries: pilots, not systems of record
None of the land projects below made a blockchain the sole legal record of ownership.
Georgia's National Agency of Public Registry (NAPR) is the case most often cited as a success. Bitfury announced a land-titling pilot with NAPR in April 2016. Reporting from November 2017 describes a private, permissioned blockchain anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain through a time-stamping service and integrated into NAPR's existing digital records system: a tamper-evidence layer added to the registry, with smart-contract functions for property sales still described as a future step.
Sweden's land registry authority, Lantmäteriet, tested property transactions on a private blockchain with ChromaWay, Telia, Kairos Future and two banks, SBAB and Landshypotek, in a phase that concluded in March 2017. Lantmäteriet's head of development called it viable, but as of July 2017 network governance and regulatory questions remained open and the authority was planning a wider testbed rather than a production system.
In August 2018 Medici Land Governance, then a subsidiary of Overstock.com, announced an agreement with the World Bank to support the design, implementation and evaluation of land tenure pilots. The Oakland Institute, an advocacy group, has criticised blockchain titling programmes of this kind, arguing that they are geared towards private investment and overlook customary tenure. That is a critique of policy design rather than of the technology, and it is worth weighing before treating any titling pilot as a template.
Identity is at an earlier stage still. UNDP's new Blockchain Advisory Group, discussed below, lists inclusive legal identity among the themes for its future meetings: a statement of intent, not a system in operation.
Trade documents: the platforms failed, the legal layer did not
The best-funded consortia in this area have folded. Maersk and IBM announced on 29 November 2022 that TradeLens would be discontinued because it had not reached commercial viability as an independent business; it had over 300 members and data on more than 65% of containerised trade, and was due to go offline by the end of the first quarter of 2023. we.trade went insolvent in June 2022, and the holding company of Marco Polo entered insolvency in Ireland in February 2023. Contour closed at the end of November 2023 after failing to secure more funding from its backers, which included nine banks; Ledger Insights reported it was processing 60 to 70 transactions a month and described Komgo as the only major network left standing.
What has shipped is a change in the law. The UK's Electronic Trade Documents Act 2023 came into force on 20 September 2023, giving qualifying electronic trade documents, including bills of lading, the same legal effect as paper. UNCITRAL's Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records, adopted on 13 July 2017, is a template, not a treaty: it has effect only where a country enacts it. On the technical side, ISO 5909:2026, published in January 2026, sets out business processes and data interchange for electronic bills of lading based on distributed ledger technology. It standardises a format; it does not put a network into service.
Bond issuance: the most repeated live deployment
Sovereign and multilateral bond issuance has produced the longest run of settled transactions in this field, though the settlement rails underneath are still being tested.
The World Bank's bond-i, priced in August 2018, raised A$110 million on a blockchain platform arranged by Commonwealth Bank of Australia. In May 2019 the two enabled secondary-market trades recorded on the blockchain, and in August 2019 a second tranche raised a further A$50 million. In October 2023 the World Bank issued EUR 100 million of digitally native notes as the first issuer on Euroclear's Digital Financial Market Infrastructure, listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange.
The EIB has issued a series of digital bonds. The first, in April 2021, was a EUR 100 million two-year bond on the public Ethereum blockchain, with the underwriters' payment represented on the blockchain as central bank digital currency in partnership with Banque de France. A £50 million bond followed in January 2023 on HSBC's Orion platform. The sixth, EUR 100 million in November 2024, used Banque de France's Cash DL3S cash tokens interoperating with Goldman Sachs's GS DAP platform, as part of the Eurosystem's exploratory work on wholesale settlement. Between May and November 2024 that work processed over 200 transactions worth EUR 1.59 billion in total, and in February 2025 the ECB's Governing Council decided to expand the initiative. The state of those rails is covered in our piece on wholesale CBDC and tokenised settlement.
National treasuries have followed. Hong Kong's government issued a HK$800 million tokenised green bond in February 2023 on Goldman Sachs's GS DAP platform, settled through the Central Moneymarkets Unit; the government described it as the first tokenised green bond issued by a government globally. In February 2024 it offered around HK$6 billion of digital green bonds in four currencies on HSBC Orion, which international investors could access through Euroclear or Clearstream. A third issue, of HK$10 billion, followed in November 2025 and was reported to be 13 times oversubscribed. The Philippines' Bureau of the Treasury sold 15 billion pesos, about USD 270 million, of tokenised treasury bonds to institutional buyers in November 2023, held in a Treasury-owned distributed ledger registry.
An IMF technical note published on 7 April 2026 on public financial management shows how early this still is. Its box on pioneering uses of digital money in fiscal operations covers two countries: the Philippines' tokenised bond, which it says used a dual registry structure, and Brazil, whose Treasury is exploring the central bank's Drex pilot and ran a 2023 hackathon on tokenised government securities. The note says a radical overhaul of public financial management systems will realistically take 10 to 20 years, less for countries with strong digital foundations, and that technology by itself is not a panacea. Why a token can move while the legal machinery beneath it does not is covered in our piece on tokenisation from pilot to production.
What Proof of Talk's own programme recorded
Two sessions at the Paris 2026 edition, held at the Louvre Palace on 2–3 June 2026, bear on this. The agenda listed "UNDP Blockchain Advisory Group Inaugural Launch" in the Roundtable Lounge on 3 June, from 14:00 to 16:30, with no speakers named. UNDP says it launched the group there on 3 June, chaired by Haoliang Xu, UNDP's Associate Administrator at the time, with 26 member organisations. The first meeting focused on financial inclusion and digital finance, and the group is to meet twice a year on themes including public trust and digital governance, inclusive legal identity, financial inclusion, sustainability and climate accountability, and digital labour. It is an advisory body; it has not deployed anything itself.
The same afternoon, "SDG Blockchain Accelerator Impact Showcase" ran on the X Ventures Masterclass Stage from 15:45 to 17:30, again with no speakers named. The accelerator is led by UNDP's Alternative Finance Lab with partners including the Blockchain for Good Alliance and EMURGO Labs. UNDP's own summary, published 16 April 2026, says its two global cohorts delivered 46 pilot- and implementation-ready solutions, 12 of them entering real-world testing, with government or public-sector entities involved in 73% and 70% embedded in national and regional programmes. Those figures are self-reported, not an independent evaluation. The next cohort will anchor each solution in an existing country programme with at least a year of operational runway.
Reading a pitch against this record
The pattern is consistent. Where a ledger coordinates institutions that share a real problem, such as agencies avoiding duplicate aid or issuers and investors settling a bond, it has tended to keep running. Where it was pitched as a replacement for a legal system of record, such as land titles or trade documents, it has tended to stay a pilot or close, and in trade the missing piece was as much the law and the business case as the technology. None of this is legal, tax or investment advice.