Buenos Aires has become the world’s first city to launch a blockchain-based digital identity system for its residents. This initiative allows over 3.6 million people to store more than 60 ID documents on the government-backed MiBA platform. Since Sam Altman’s controversial Worldcoin project emerged last year, the Web3 community has been abuzz with discussions about using blockchain-based ID systems to verify real humans in response to the rise of bots.
The Buenos Aires government’s initiative seeks to provide residents with a new level of privacy and security for managing sensitive documents digitally, a report by Argentinian publication Ambito said this week.
Blockchain networks are seen as a potential alternative to Web2 servers, storing data in small blocks distributed across the network. This decentralized structure makes the data more secure, as it cannot be easily compromised by hackers in a single attack. Moreover, information stored on blockchain is permanent and unalterable, adding a layer of transparency to data management.
In Buenos Aires, users of the MiBA app have been assigned decentralized digital identities, integrated with QuarkID wallets and powered by the Layer-2 blockchain ZKsync. The MiBA app is a local digital platform that allows residents to access city administration documents and services.
With this new feature, Buenos Aires now allows MiBA users to securely store birth, death, student, and marriage certificates, along with vaccination records, gross income tax documents, and other official credentials.
“This initiative demonstrates the power of blockchain to revolutionise other use cases, such as government services, by empowering citizens to securely own their data,” the report by Ambito quoted Diego Fernández, Secretary of Innovation and Digital Transformation for the City of Buenos Aires as saying.
The government of Argentina’s capital calls this initiative a key step toward empowering residents to take ownership and responsibility for their personal data.
In addition to exploring blockchain use cases, Argentina is also researching the use of Bitcoin. In May, Argentine officials began discussions with their counterparts in El Salvador to learn from their strategies and experiences in adopting Bitcoin, which is currently trading at $67,300 (roughly Rs. 56.5 lakh) as per CoinMarketCap.
With a gross domestic product (GDP) of approximately $640 billion, Argentina is one of the largest economies in Latin America, as per WorldBank. An earlier report by Reuters, however, highlighted that the Argentina’s economy recorded a year-on-year drop of 8.4 percent in March, which may have prompted the country to explore diversifying its financial instruments by incorporating Bitcoin.
Notably, the central bank of Argentina had banned banks and financial institutes from offering crypto-related services in May 2022.
While Argentina has already deployed blockchain-based digital IDs, third party projects like World and Humanity Protocol are working to get people verified as real humans on blockchain networks on a global level.