How did Bhutan go from zero to 80% national digital identity adoption in just two years? In this episode of The SSI Orbit Podcast, host Mathieu Glaude welcomes back Pallavi Sharma, Lead of Marketing & Communications for Bhutan’s National Digital Identity (NDI) program, to unpack one of the world’s fastest and most successful digital identity deployments.
Pallavi shares how Bhutan integrated banks, telcos, insurers, and government services into a unified trust ecosystem, removing friction for citizens and enabling secure, remote access to essential services. From self-attested biometrics to P2P chat, she explains the surprising features that drove massive user adoption, and why convenience, not privacy, became the real driver of trust.
You’ll also hear how Bhutan is preparing for the next wave of digital innovation, including cross-border interoperability with India, support for blockchain networks like Polygon and Ethereum, and long-term plans for e-voting, land tokenization, health credentials, and CBDCs.
In this episode:
How Bhutan reached 80% adoption across a population of 770,000
The role of regulators and public–private alignment
What citizens actually care about (hint: it’s not decentralization)
eKYC breakthroughs: live-verified photos, signatures & remote onboarding
Web3 readiness, biometrics, and the future of digital public infrastructure
Tune in to learn what the rest of the world can take from Bhutan’s rapid digital identity transformation.