Matthias Broner: UNICEF's Financial Rails for the Age of AI | Intelligence at the Frontier 2026

Thank you everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Um, and I'm today representing UNICEF's Office of Innovation. I've been blockchain consulting with them for a few months now. So, it's great to be able to leverage blockchain a bit back.

But all of this is under the backdrop of the um funding and the rise of AI. So, we're going to go through some initiatives that UDIC has been working on for some time and also where this kind of positions all of us. So, all right, great. Um, so who am I? Just a quick overview.

My name is Vas. Um, I've been working mostly in Silicon Valley startups doing growth. In the last five, six years, I started working full-time in blockchain space. Uh, I came to as an enthusiast. I thought it was just people for Raspberry Pies in the basement.

Turns out there's a whole industry of people really working hard on those crawlings. Uh, I know some sign of blockchain crypto. The reality is it's a technology. It's a tool. So, technology can always be used for good or people.

Um I've been making it a a core focus to have it use for good and to find different innovative ways to make equitable systems. Uh a little bit about background uh fun speaking after simocus last year to lost the world's first CK back digital identity. So my insider is around how do we get a real world adoption of this kindology uh and really find new ways to get this in the eyes of real people hiding a virus getting a bad fit. people shouldn't have to use wallets assigned tr all that information. So we're finding kind of novel innovative ways to get snacks of folks in really daily uh leverage situations.

Um and you know lately I've been working with uh the office of innovation which is really so we'll rub through those and the first one to talk about is uh first is what is for those of you that Martin is the United Nations Children's Fund. The E stands for emergency is a vestigial name as this was created in the wake of World War II to fund different educational programs for treasure cost across the globe. Since then it is active in 190 countries. There are 43 projects uh funded by the office of innovation which is using blockchain technology and since 2019 UNICEF is actually the longest standing UN organization that is able to hold, distribute and disperse um crypto assets. So primarily it's been Bitcoin and ETH.

Uh more recently they've enabled stable coin. Uh we'll get into a lot of different initiatives that they're working on, but to date they've distributed over four Bitcoin and 2600 ETH. Depending on when those were dispersed and how they're used that that dollar value has shifted quite a bit, but it is a really amazing initiative that they've been spearheading. Um and they're the only part of the UN organization that can do this type of work. So what is the DRIPs list?

I've got the QR on here a few times if you all want to access, but drips is actually a partner of funding the commons distribute and share funds across open-source digital public goods. Uh, as I mentioned when I did work with the government of Wenocitis, we actually created um a UN verified digital public goods standard which uh is called cork ID. Uh, which so I've gone through the process on the back end of how do you actually become a digital public good. It is a rigorous intensive process built around open source and fair standards. So it's really incredible to see these uh innovative kind of technologies being leveraged.

Now this pilot for UNICEF is around finding different funding mechanisms. Um as many people may or may not be aware funding for the UN has been drawn back especially by the US in the last couple of years. Um this is one of many mechanisms they are doing to try and find creative and innovative ways to get funds into the hands of people building real technology. So, I'm going to go through these different uh digital public goods. These are not blockchain based technologies.

There are some within this uh DPG umbrella that are built on blockchain. These are just some of the most used technologies and we're trying to see if the drips list can be a way to get folks who have some spare ERC20s aka tokens lying around to donate and distribute across these protocols. So, the first one, Babel. This is actually a parenting app that is locally adapted for tips and language for parents across the globe. is active in 17 countries.

It was help six million fails. So this is one of the projects that the BKX worked through the stri initiative. The next one is hope uh which is a bespoke humanitarian information management system for cash transfers. Um so far they've reached over 4 million uh children into 2025. There are 25 million total people that have been assisted.

Um and this is active across 33 countries. The next initiative is OKI. Uh it's a period tracking app uh created for girls across the globe and it's providing advice on sexual reproductive health and rights. All of the UNICEF projects are really pervasive around topics around human uh education, health and support. Um and this so far has helped 1 million girls um in 12 countries.

Um it's a gamified really incredible application. Premier, this is digital case management incident monitoring for child protection with over 20,000 users. They've already processed over two million cases acted in 70 countries and this is for workers to manage professionally related data with the tools that facilitate child protection and gender based violence case management incident monitoring family tracing and reunification. And the final application on the list is Rabbit Pro. So this is a platform designed to build, pilot and scale mobile messaging interventions.

Um and this is kind of a mobile based application that can be used from anywhere in the world. So far, 8 billion messages have been transferred in 131 countries. Most of us are typically using free SMS. That's not always the case globally. So, this is a really incredible way for people to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate across the globe.

So, those are the five uh DUR initiatives. Um there there's many many more things that uh UNICEF is powering behind the scenes. This is kind of an incredible pilot that they're using to see can the actinetic pupils to donate via crypto in one of the many different accusacies. So for those of you that maybe are more experienced web 3 holders or have tang run, this is a great way to just put a little bit of money to secur there are other issues though that are also crypto. So for those of you that are uh maybe big e folders and you have it sitting idle, you can actually use another technology called impact stake.

Uh this was developed I I believe by Lido um supported by the GSR foundation and UNICEF has their own uh staking pool. So you can go in put your idle ETH stake it there. It'll get returns through actual e staking which is benefiting the security of the Ethereum network. The rewards are then donated into these innovative funding projects more than just those five on the drips list and then whenever you want you return you retrieve your ETH and you can use it how you need. So if you have any assets sitting idle this is a great way to put them to work for a good cause.

So that's the impact staking initiative and then this really innovative um program called aid link. Uh the problem is how do you send money when there's little to no access to internet difficulties around dispersing physical cash. The the context is that cash transfers your lifeline um in UDL alone glitter $688 million into three.5 million household in just 2024. Traditional systems are slow, low paying, expensive and the enviries get cut, tracking is difficult and digital topic costs remain unreachable.

So while there might be the want to do to distribute your funds, actually getting them in the hands of people to use them is complex on ramping and off ramping in different currencies is very complicated. And how you make this happen with one physical cash having infrastructure issues to bring and then two with cryptocurrency you need internet access which isn't always accessible in all these regions that do need the most uh direct support. So this program Away was actually built with three different uh UNICEF funded technologies. Rson from Nepal which provided the blockchain infrastructure. Ekabi from Argentina who did the cork or mentioned earlier uh they built the digital wallet and Kotani pay from Kenya handled the conversion of digital assets into local currency.

So what the problem is is how do you get the funds to folks? The solution is most of these people can have access to a mobile phone. that mobile phone can access SMS. So they built a behind-the-scenes infrastructure that basically creates wallets and does all the blockchain transactions without having any access to the internet. So now folks who don't even have access to the internet can have access to their own personalized digital bank account, receive funds, disperse them on ramp and off-ramp into local currencies.

It was an incredible learning moment as well because some of these transactions took two days to process for different reasons due to UI. So a lot of this work that the office of innovation is doing is to build out different creative systems to try and actually uh test learn and then build something scalable. And one of the the other projects that is live and up up to date is Karma Gap. So this is a an ability for projects to do open grants for open source technologies track and measure milestones live and be able to report all of this when relevant on chain. So completely verifiable progress tracking to make sure that grants are distributed and dispersed upon completion of milestones and help anyone across the globe not only contribute to these projects but also keep track of support and manage these cases.

So this is another open platform that's been developed uh in conjunction with UNICEF and Karma. Um, and it's just really a great way to continue to find innovative ways to leverage blockchain to support these kind of humanitarian programs and make sure that progress is being made and the funds just don't remain idle and have no visibility into it. So, um, for instance, you can see here, this is kind of the UI there, but you can log in and endorse and vouch for projects. You can work on it. You can see the process, the progress, and there's due dates so that all of these hosts could stay out of track.

It's a really clever way to leverage flashing technology to be verifiable uh tracking of these great workers. So where does this all fit in today's contest and where we are here with funded comments? The question of AI is we have a great cars featuring is here right and we're already seeing mass layouts on the pool. We're seeing the replacement of tons of functions and we're not sure if those are where it falls or not but it's happening under our feet and so far these systems are not built to benefit the humans that are doing daily right the humans that are actually going to be disloyal replaced and you know maybe it's a kid to the innovation of the car this was the footage you know shikier said this is the last brawn trolley now we've got these whimos flying around the city change isn't necessarily inherently bad change is the constant But how are we building systems that will benefit humans while this change occurs? So you know it is on us to to find additional novel mechanisms that will create more equitable systems verifiable and fair.

Blockchain is but one tool that can be the monetary and financial layer to support that. UNICEF is extremely uh you know innovative when it comes to these massive organizations but all things still move slow need to be tested need to be learned and explored upon and expanded. So all of you here exploring and learning on all these different floors of what is funding, what is AI, uh how how is blockchain a part of this, I guess I just urge you to continue to collaborate and find new innovative technologies from each other that we can leverage to build a better world. It is on us. No one else is doing it for us.

So we are going to have to take the onus to create these systems and push for change and push for policy and push for technology that does benefit the few. Um and so you know at this time the coordination rails are being built that will determine if this AI surplus reaches the people who need it most. So you know thankful to be working with a highly innovative team like UNICEF. This is a a constantly changing space and the world is shifting around us and thank you all for being here and participating in this conversation. So one final call for the drips list if you guys can get it.

If not otherwise please you know I'm happy to chat with any of you about the initiatives that are going on here. All this is public information. Um, and thank you