Verifiable Cities

The Use Case Lab is an applied research initiative at the Ethereum Foundation focused on advancing under-explored, high-impact use cases for Ethereum through collaborative prototyping, pilots, and standards.

Verifiable Cities is an open call for implementations that examine where coordination and verifiability constraints are most acute in urban systems, and where public blockchains can meaningfully expand civic and state capacity.

Resources

Program Team

  • Rithikha Rajamohan (LinkedIn | X) – Cities Program Specialist
  • Ori Shimony (X) – Use Case Lab Lead

This brief serves as a map of the current use case landscape and a resource to support further inquiry as the space evolves.

Overview

Cities are increasingly expected to deliver public services with greater effectiveness and accountability. While many are beginning to adopt AI and data-driven systems, a shared digital foundation to support coordination and verifiability across organizations and domains remains largely absent.

As a result, long-standing public-sector challenges—such as fragmented data sharing, citizen privacy concerns, slow financial flows, and high compliance and reporting costs—continue to divert institutional capacity away from improving services and outcomes. Instead, this capacity is often spent managing public trust through short-term political negotiation and manual administrative processes.

Rather than introduce new fully centralized or closed platforms, as previous and current government modernization efforts have done, recent advances in public blockchains make it possible to transparently embed verification, accountability, and coordination capabilities directly into how public rules and finances operate. These technologies offer a practical path to increasing state capacity without expanding state power and vendor control, or adding further administrative overhead. In doing so, they can enable the development of a shared digital “trust” layer across cities that extend accountability from administrative processes to transparent technical mechanisms.

Why Cities?

  • Hypothesis #1: Proximity to Operational Pressure
    Cities are the primary institutional level where coordination and service delivery must happen in real time due to their proximity to operational pressure.

  • Hypothesis #2: Dense Networks & Pragmatic Constraints
    Cities face immediate service demands, operate across dense networks of public and private actors, and contend with real implications and constraints that require equally pragmatic solutions.

  • Hypothesis #3: Global Scalability
    Despite wide variation in competitive pressures and context, thousands of municipal governments and service providers worldwide face common operational needs, creating clear but currently underleveraged opportunities for experimentation and knowledge transfer.

  • Hypothesis #4: Levers for Innovation
    Together these conditions make cities powerful levers for public sector innovation, offering a scalable pathway for modernizing civic and state capacity.

Call for Implementations

The Ethereum Foundation Use Case Lab is issuing an open call for implementations. The work is oriented toward collaboration with city and regional governments, as well as other funders and organizations engaged in municipal innovation. Priority will be given to implementations that are narrowly scoped, aware of real-world constraints and considerations, and test approaches that can inform broader adoption over time.

Implementations may take several forms:

  • Sandboxed/Focused Pilots: Tactical tests in controlled environments.
  • Policy Frameworks & Regulatory Guidance: Documentation and structures for legal compliance.
  • Technical Primitives & Open Standards: Building the underlying infrastructure for interoperability.

We anticipate supporting a select number of implementations through a combination of technical support, exploratory funding, and connections to relevant collaborators and ecosystems. The specific form and scope of resourcing will be determined through initial conversations as appropriate.

If you are currently working in or are interested in learning more about this space, we invite you to submit an Expression of Interest.

Use Case Radar

Inspiration & Further Reading

AI & Programmability

Trust & Cryptographic Verifiability

City & Policy Innovation

Government & Digital Public Infrastructure

Discussion

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