🌍 This Week in Web3ForGood
Bhutan, Gaza, stablecoins, and sovereignty
Web3forGood is a weekly publication that celebrates and critically analyzes how emerging web3 technology could be used to make the world a better place.
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What do Bhutan, Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, and Cameroon have in common? Stablecoins.
We know, we know… you think you’ve heard enough about stablecoins! Actually, the story is complicated. Promising, but complicated. Are stablecoins more governance tech or financial tech? Both? How do they interact with personal freedom?
We’re thinking about it all. + Opportunities, news, and more below.
WAGMI (we are going to make an impact!)
What’s Inside
📚 What We’re Thinking About
📣 Latest News
🔈 Watch & Listen
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
🎪 Events
📡 On Our Radar
✨ And One More Thing
📚 What We’re Thinking About
🌱 Stablecoins and Sovereignty
Stablecoins have been the darling of web3 over the last few years, as institutions rush to adopt them and people (us included) continue to tout their benefits for financial access and quick distribution of aid with seemingly little risk or downside. The reality, of course, like all things, isn’t that simple. Stablecoins behave almost like constitutional law for money. Design choices decide who can enter an economy, who can exit it, what gets surveilled, and what can be frozen. National governments and political power brokers understand this now.
Two very different news stories this week have us thinking about financial freedom in a new way and asking, “Who gets to set the terms of financial life? ”
First up, a trip to Bhutan.
The eastern Himalayan nation has launched a digital nomad visa that requires a $10k refundable deposit into TER, a gold-backed token built on Solana and custodied through DK Bank in partnership with the Gelephu Mindfulness City initiative. The structure is interesting because the visa is not simply a tourism product; it’s a policy tool that routes foreign capital into Bhutan’s own sovereign financial infrastructure, then rewards participation with time, presence, and legal access to the state. That is a new kind of inversion in a world where smaller countries are often asked to integrate into other people’s systems. Instead, Bhutan is proposing its own.
Here, blockchain tech, and specifically stablecoins, are a way to modernize capital formation without handing the keys to foreign banks, foreign issuers, or the default gravity of the dollar. This is what financial sovereignty can look like when it is built deliberately rather than imposed by necessity. A nomad visa is not humanitarian aid, and Bhutan is not claiming it is, but the program does show how a country can use stablecoins to attract aligned capital, test new rails, and grow capacity on its own timeline. The state is not only adopting stablecoins. The state is shaping stablecoins into a tool of its own development strategy.
A critical reading asks who this empowers and who it excludes. A $10,000 deposit creates a high bar that favors the globally mobile, and crypto onboarding always risks excluding people who lack access, literacy, or trust in the tooling. Custody and compliance also create chokepoints, even when the asset is sovereign-backed. These critiques clarify the stakes. Bhutan’s model highlights a path where stablecoins can strengthen a nation’s autonomy, while still raising questions about who gets invited into that autonomy and under what terms.
Next, we travel to Gaza, where stablecoins and sovereignty dance in a much different way.
Reports indicate Trump’s “Board of Peace” is exploring a dollar-pegged stablecoin to help Gazans transact digitally after war and banking collapse, while explicitly positioning it as not being a new Palestinian currency. The humanitarian argument is straightforward. Digital dollars could move faster than cash, reduce leakage, support merchants, and offer a workable medium of exchange when physical currency and traditional payment systems break down. People who live inside fragile systems often get punished first by the absence of reliable money. Tools that restore basic economic coordination can save lives.
Thinking about sovereignty makes the situation less clear. A dollar-pegged instrument designed under an external political project risks baking foreign influence into everyday survival, then calling it stability. It seems like control does not need a central bank to exist if control can live in issuer governance, compliance chokepoints, blacklist policies, and the ability to decide which wallets count as legitimate participants in the economy. Aid can become conditionality at the protocol layer, and “transparency” can slide into surveillance when power is asymmetric.
Both stories reveal a central truth that the stablecoin discourse tends to avoid. Stablecoins are not only a question of efficiency or inclusion. They are a question of authority. Bhutan uses a stable asset to invite outsiders into a sovereign experiment on its terms. Gaza discussions risk using emergency need to justify a monetary rail that could outlast the emergency, with governance defined far from the people who would depend on it.
Our takeaway? We must treat stablecoins as governance technology first and payment technology second. Success should be measured through consent, credible local stewardship, exit rights, privacy protections, and clear limits on who can flip the off switch.
📊 Stablecoins under real world constraints
Mercy Corps Ventures recently published its 2025 Impact Report, which includes findings from pilots in Syria, Afghanistan, and Cameroon, which tested stablecoin rails for aid delivery and cross border merchant payments. Results include 96 percent faster aid delivery in Syria and 74 percent lower transaction costs for merchants in Cameroon, offering a closer look at how digital asset infrastructure performs beyond controlled pilots.
These numbers matter because they move the stablecoin conversation out of theory and into lived conditions. Conflict, disrupted banking, limited connectivity, and fragile trust are not edge cases for humanitarian work. Those constraints are the environment. Evidence from real deployments helps move promising to proven.
Mercy Corps Ventures’ pilots offer a grounded way to think about what stablecoins are capable of empowering. Faster aid delivery can protect dignity and reduce harm when families are waiting on essentials. Lower merchant costs can keep small businesses alive and reduce the hidden tax that informal financial channels impose on people who already have the least room to absorb it. Outcomes like these are what financial inclusion means in practice. Check out the full impact report.
Plus:
🪞 Why We’re Still Here: Reflections on Values, Politics, and the Battle for Crypto’s Soul: “We aren’t just collectively imagining what can be built anymore. We’re being forced to reckon with what values are being encoded into the systems taking shape, and who those systems are really serving.“ (Crypto Altruists)
☔ Can prediction markets make it rain?: ““Prediction markets risk constructing rather than reflecting political realities,” another academic study warns. “Prices that are presumed to reveal collective wisdom may actually amplify perceptions, momentum, and bias.”“ (Byron Gilliam for Blockworks)
🎓 What Blockchain in Educations Tells Us About the Future of Work: “Blockchain implementations across sectors create demand for capabilities beyond technical development. Governance design, ethical reasoning, stakeholder coordination, cultural competence, regulatory navigation, and change management are not supplementary considerations; they are foundational to operational success, whether implementing educational credentials, supply chain tracking, healthcare data exchange, or financial infrastructure.“ (International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications)
📣 Latest News
Ethereum Foundation Pledges to Support Privacy-First, Permissionless DeFi
The Ethereum Foundation just staked 70,000 ETH to fund its future
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
El Salvador overhauls Bitcoin learning programme for public education system
Hong Kong to issue first stablecoin issuer licenses next month: finance chief
Reports and Project Updates
Bitcoin Indonesia’s Sats-turday Market: A Closed-Loop Bitcoin System in Action
Metagov Project Update: Interoperable Deliberative Tools in 2026
🔈 Watch & Listen
Crypto Altruists - Episode 240 - From Afghanistan to Rural India: Blockchain and Humanitarian Resilience, with Algorand Foundation & HesabPay
Your Undivided Attention - The Race to Build God: AI’s Existential Gamble — Yoshua Bengio & Tristan Harris at Davos
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
Hack: The Intelligence at the Frontier Hackathon, hosted by Funding the Commons and Protocol Labs, is a curated, in-person build sprint with a $10K+ prize pool. The event runs alongside Funding the Commons: Intelligence at the Frontier Festival, inside Frontier Tower in San Francisco. They’re looking for working prototypes—real systems, real demos, real code. Projects that push intelligence forward while staying grounded in practical use.
Speak: Speaker applications are open for Funding the Commons SF.
Funding: The Decentralization Research Center (DRC) is a 501(c)(4) social welfare non-profit that advocates for decentralization as a fundamental characteristic of emerging technologies. The DRC’s mandate is to connect stakeholders and create opportunities for innovators to collaborate, gain momentum, and guide the ownership, governance, and regulation of emerging technologies towards decentralization. The Decentralization Research Grant supports members of the wider community, enables more ideas to get exposure to policymakers, and creates a broader base of interest and support for decentralized technologies, governance, and the policy required for them to flourish.
🎪 Events
🆕= New to the roundup this week
Virtual
DWebCamp Cascadia 2026 call for participation is happening March 3. 🆕
Celo Governance Call #87 is happening March 5. 🆕
AI Lawyering in Practice: How Global Firms Are Integrating AI is happening March 5.
Becoming Unstoppable: Financial Freedom Webinar from Human Rights Foundation is happening March 23-25.
IRL
DWeb Camp Unconference + Meetup @ c-base is happening February 28 in Berlin.
Parallel Society is happening March 6-8 in Lisbon.
LabLab Camp is happening March 12-15 in São José dos Campos, SP, Brazil. 🆕
ETHMUMBAI is happening March 12-15 in Mumbai.
Funding the Commons SF: Intelligence at the Frontier is happening March 14 in San Francisco.
Touch Grass: A Retreat for Builders from Bread Collective is happening March 26-29 in Skamokawa, WA.
Stable Summit is happening in March 27-28 in Cannes, France.
The Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC 9) is happening March 30 - April 2 in Cannes, France.
Horizons in Ethics & Emerging Technologies (HEET 2026) is happening April 16 in Torino, Piemonte, Italy.
RightsCon 2026 is happening May 5-8 in Zambia.
Bitdeer X ACJR Awards are happening May 7 in Miami Beach.
ETHCluj is happening May 13-14 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Edge Esmeralda is happening May 30 - June 27 in Healdsburg, California.
The Oslo Freedom Forum is happening June 1-3 in Oslo, Norway.
ETHConf is happening June 8-10 in NYC.
DWeb Camp 2026 is happening July 8–12 in Alte Hölle - Brandenburg, Germany.
Valley of the Commons is happening August 24 - September 20 in the Austrian Alps.
Boston Blockchain Week is happening September 8-10 in Quincy, MA.
The Gathering is happening September 11-15 in Portugal.
Devcon 8 is happening November 3-6 in Mumbai, India.
Recurring
Monthly Earth Day is a global event that happens on the 22nd every month, not just once a year. Get involved next on March 22.
📡 On Our Radar
LawZero is a nonprofit startup developing technical solutions for highly-capable, safe-by-design AI systems.
Mavu 2.0 is the human layer for AI agents. With an API, you can connect your agent to a responsive global workforce, with seamless stablecoin payments built in. This infrastructure facilitates a structured collaboration between humans and agents, defining the future of work.
✨ And One More Thing
