While Georgia made headlines with the launch of its national stablecoin, the real move was Sierra Leone, which signed a deal to build a comprehensive national digital identity and stablecoin system from scratch. What truly matters here, however, isn’t about trading. It’s about who gets access to money in the first place.
The Stablecoin Everyone’s Watching Is the Wrong One
In May 2026, and the Georgian government announced GEL₮, one of a growing list of non-dollar stablecoins built around a local currency rather than the dollar. The benefits include facilitating cross-border trade, reducing costs, and enabling programmable payments, all with the blessing of the National Bank of Georgia. As Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino put it, “Stablecoins are no longer a niche financial instrument. They are becoming part of the infrastructure layer for global finance.”
He’s right, and that infrastructure layer is already being built into global settlement. But he’s describing the easy case. Georgia already has a functional banking system, payment rails, and a connected population. In the countries where none of that infrastructure ever existed, a national stablecoin isn’t an upgrade. It’s the whole financial system, built from zero.
1.3 Billion People Aren’t in the System
Worldwide, approximately 1.3 billion adults lack access to a bank, roughly 21% of the global adult population, as reported by the World Bank’s Global Findex Database 2025. The reasons aren’t rooted in a distrust of banks or a preference for cash. The issue is that the system was never designed to serve them, with barriers such as required documentation, distant branches, and costs. This is a problem of infrastructure, not attitude.
Sierra Leone epitomizes this problem. According to the World Bank’s Sierra Leone Financial Inclusion Project fact sheet, a mere 12.4% of adults in the country have a bank account. By 2024, the National Civil Registration Authority had assigned ID numbers to about 80% of the population, but only around 500,000 physical cards were picked up that year. The data is readily available. What’s missing is the physical credential. Without that credential, there’s no KYC. And without KYC, there’s no account. The issue isn’t with the population; the real bottleneck is a plastic card that never made it to print.
Bhutan Already Built This
In 2023, Bhutan’s national digital identity system was launched on Hyperledger Indy, only to be shifted to Polygon in 2024. Then, in October 2025, the country’s system made history by becoming the first national identity system to be anchored to the Ethereum blockchain. The full migration is expected to be complete by the first quarter of 2026. Once finished, the system will allow around 800,000 residents to store licenses, health records, and educational certificates in wallets they have complete control over. Moreover, zero-knowledge proofs will verify specific attributes such as age without revealing the underlying data.
In a demonstration of the significance of the launch, both Vitalik Buterin and Aya Miyaguchi, the president of the Ethereum Foundation, attended the ceremony in person. This made clear that Ethereum’s leadership regards it as a truly global first, rather than simply an IT project undertaken by a regional government. The platform behind it, Bhutan NDI, is a subsidiary of Druk Holding and Investments, Bhutan’s sovereign wealth arm, and it is now exporting the model directly.
The Company Selling Governments Their Own Infrastructure
On July 5, 2026, Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation officially signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Bhutan NDI and the SIGN Foundation. Not just a trial run, but a comprehensive national identity framework encompassing open-source verifiable credentials that meet W3C standards, a digital wallet, a stablecoin payment infrastructure, asset tokenization, and a regional innovation hub at Felei Tech City. The emphasis on open standards is no afterthought; it is the key to ensuring that Sierra Leone’s identity system can seamlessly interoperate with the global ecosystem and avoid being shackled to a single vendor indefinitely.
Since its inception in 2021 as EthSign, SIGN has received over $55 million in funding. This amount includes a 2022 seed round worth $12 million, backed by Sequoia Capital, along with a $25.5 million round in October 2025 led by YZi Labs and IDG Capital. The company aims to reach 50 million people in the first year of a new government deployment, a target yet to be achieved. Sierra Leone is one of several regions in the pipeline that the company is currently working on.
In a departure from the official script, SIGN CEO Xin Yan said on the On The Margin podcast, weeks before the deal was made public: “…we also have Bhutan, which is also actually [a] digitally advanced country, and also we have Caribbean islands like Barbados and Dominican[a], and at last, we also, we just signed a contract with Sierra Leon[e] in West Africa…” Yan’s confirmation of a sovereign deal in his own words, even before the government got around to issuing its own press release, speaks volumes.
What sets it apart is the governance structure. A Joint Working Group and a phased Strategic Implementation Roadmap are key. Moreover, Sierra Leone gets to run the system independently, without relying on external vendors, thanks to the knowledge-transfer clause. That’s the fundamental difference between Digital Public Infrastructure and a vendor contract with a glossy rebrand.
The Wallet Is the Product, Not the Coin
What links Georgia, Bhutan, and Sierra Leone is not the technology itself. Instead, it’s the convergence of a multifunctional wallet that serves as a credential, backed by a state-issued identity, and holds programmable national currency. This means a citizen can receive payments, hold value, and transact without needing access to a bank branch. Governments can transfer subsidies directly onto the digital ledger. Employers can pay wages into it, and merchants can accept payments from it.
Whether stablecoin rails actually deliver on that for underserved markets is a separate question from SIGN’s pitch, and it’s the one that matters. This is where payment rails become the real test, not the ceremony. “Especially in the currencies in emerging markets, liquidity begins to dry up,” Kamal said on the same podcast. “How do you shore up liquidity is very important… you’re also not charging 4%, 5%, 6%, which the traditional world does.” For Sierra Leone, none of the identity architecture matters if the rails underneath it aren’t cheaper and more liquid than what came before.
The Bottom Line
While Georgia garnered the lion’s share of the news cycle, Bhutan toiled away on the more challenging project, garnering only minimal coverage. Sierra Leone, meanwhile, managed to achieve the best of both worlds, implementing its project on open standards through a formal working group and crafting a roadmap that would enable it to expand across the public and private sectors simultaneously.
57% of adults across Sub-Saharan Africa remain unbanked, no account, no wallet. That’s the largest untapped financial market on the planet, sitting untouched. “East Africa produced one of the most interesting and innovative ways of moving money through M-Pesa that didn’t exist in the West,” said Chris Turner, Kula co-founder, on the On The Margin podcast. “They had a leapfrog opportunity with the technology that was available, and they produced something the West didn’t have and still doesn’t have at scale…” Sierra Leone is betting on the same leapfrog. Skip the branch. Go straight to the credential and the wallet. Three countries just quietly started building the infrastructure to serve the largest underserved financial market on earth, and most financial media hasn’t connected these three stories yet.