The UN Development Structure has signed an agreement with the Stellar Development Foundation, establishing blockchain transfers as a permanent tool. This follows a year and a half of trials in seven countries.
Field Program Results
Syria provided a clear example. There, payments for employment were organized with each transaction recorded in a distributed ledger. As a result, the share of costs for delivering aid itself fell from ten to two percent. For humanitarian organizations, where literally every cent matters, an eightfold drop in overhead means significantly more of the allocated budget reaches recipients.
Haiti demonstrated a different benefit scenario. When mobile communications were cut off, traditional payment channels stopped functioning entirely. The distributed network, however, continued to process transactions because it is not tied to the operation of any particular telecom operator.
The set of countries was chosen intentionally to reflect a range of conditions: weak banking coverage in some places, unstable mobile connections in others, or the specifics of the crisis itself. The same pattern emerged— the worse the traditional financial system performed, the more noticeable the benefit from the distributed ledger.
From Single Case to Working Regulation
Shortly before signing the agreement, the organization convened an advisory council on blockchain applications at the Paris Proof of Talk venue. The council’s scope goes beyond money transfers— digital government services and public record systems are also discussed there.
The agreement with Stellar changes the very mechanics of connecting to the technology. Previously, each country office had to justify and test the solution from scratch. Now, a unified scheme is in place: local offices can launch payments without repeated pilot testing. Essentially, this marks a shift from one-off trials to a standard operating procedure.
For the Stellar network itself, this choice is a strong argument for the platform’s maturity. It was originally created for cross-border settlements and stablecoins, and now its adoption by an organization of this scale sets a benchmark for other international organizations considering similar steps.
650 Million People Outside the Banking System
The Davos Economic Forum heard this estimate: in Africa, 650 million people lack a bank account— a figure cited by a former UN deputy secretary-general. Having a smartphone and access to a stablecoin closes this gap, allowing people to save money in a currency not subject to local inflation.
According to these estimates, in some developing economies, stablecoins are gradually becoming more important to people than direct humanitarian aid— simply because they provide immediate access to financial tools where banking infrastructure does not exist at all.
This statement is based not on a forecast, but on established practice. In Argentina, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and several other countries with accelerating inflation, residents have been independently storing savings in dollar stablecoins for years— without any involvement from international agencies. In this sense, the UN is not launching a new phenomenon, but joining a trend that has long been established from the ground up.
Competition for Payment Channels
UNDP is not working in this niche alone. Ripple has acquired a stake in African fintech service Flutterwave, aiming to expand the presence of its RLUSD stablecoin and the XRP Ledger network on the continent: money transfers there make up a significant share of family incomes, while the supporting infrastructure is still underdeveloped.
The Latin American region is following a similar path— stablecoin issuers are deliberately building routes into Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, and Venezuela, where the costs of traditional money transfers remain significant.
The change in status of blockchain payments in the humanitarian sector is what underlies the UN’s shift from an experimental format to permanent use. Not long ago, such solutions were considered a side initiative on the periphery of core activities. Now, one of the largest UN system structures is making them part of regular operational work.
Why This Goes Beyond the Humanitarian Agenda
When an organization of this scale publishes concrete, measurable results, other participants— governments, development banks, and charitable foundations— receive a ready-made argument for their own initiatives.
The drop in costs from ten to two percent in the Syrian project is not an abstract argument for the technology, but a figure that can be immediately inserted into a tender application or investment justification. It is precisely this kind of practical data that convinces faster than any presentation or theoretical calculation.
Read more: Bitcoin Reserve in the US Stuck at Agency Level
