The Trust Problem

When a Uruguayan citizen presents a credential to a Chilean hospital, a Brazilian bank, or an airline counter abroad, the verifier needs to answer two simple questions: Who issued this credential, and is it still valid?

Inside a single country, those questions can usually be answered through national systems. Across borders, they require shared trust infrastructure.

Europe has a model for this. Through common regulation and trust-list infrastructure, recognized issuers can be registered and service providers can verify the authenticity of the credentials they issue.

Latin America has no equivalent regional authority. No single government, development bank, or private company has the mandate to operate a trust registry for the whole region.

That is the problem Uruguay’s Agency for Electronic Government and the Information and Knowledge Society, known as AGESIC, and digital identity firm Blerify set out to solve: making national digital IDs interoperable across borders without creating a centrally controlled regional database.

The question is becoming more urgent as countries across the region launch digital ID systems or define national strategies aligned with emerging global standards. The issue is no longer whether governments can issue digital credentials. It is whether those credentials can be trusted outside the jurisdiction that issued them.

Marcos Allende, CEO of Blerify and a technologist who spent years at the Inter-American Development Bank building LACChain, the region’s first multilateral blockchain network, says the next challenge is interoperability.

“We are all using the same standards, the same technology,” Allende said in an interview. “The question is how we make these interoperable across borders. And that requires trust lists: a public registry where anyone can verify who issued a credential and whether it has been revoked. Right now, Latin America doesn’t have that.”

The Missing Piece

The technical concept is simple. A trust list is a public registry of authorized issuers and credential status. For cross-border digital identity, it acts as a shared map of institutional trust: a verifier does not need to connect to every agency in every country, but it does need a reliable way to know which issuers are legitimate.

In Europe, that model works because the European Commission has the regulatory authority to support common infrastructure across member states.

“In Europe, this is possible because they have common infrastructure and common regulation,” Allende said. “In Latin America, no single institution has that mandate. You cannot have one country or organization controlling the trust registry for the whole region.”

Oscar Robles Garay, who co-founded LACNIC, the regional internet address registry for Latin America and the Caribbean, and now oversees LNet, the public-permissioned blockchain network that grew out of the IDB’s regional blockchain program, said the trust problem in digital identity is structurally similar to the one LACNIC was built to solve.

“We fall into the same issue: trust,” Robles Garay said. “Either you have to trust a single centralized institution to manage all the data, or you build a decentralized database.”

Without that infrastructure, the region risks defaulting to the bilateral agreements that stalled cross-border electronic signature recognition in Latin America for more than a decade.

Uruguay’s Answer

In 2025, Uruguay’s AGESIC and Blerify worked on a pilot designed to address exactly that problem.

The project was a decentralized trust registry built on smart contracts deployed across two blockchain networks: Avalanche, the blockchain used in a California DMV digitization initiative, and LNet.

Each participating country runs its own blockchain node, holds its own cryptographic keys, and remains synchronized with the rest of the network approximately every two seconds, allowing trust-list updates to propagate quickly without requiring every verifier to call the issuing government directly.

A verifier anywhere on the network can confirm whether a credential is valid without contacting the issuing country’s systems and without any central operator in the middle.

“A third party no longer has to go back to the issuer to check a credential,” Allende said. “It can verify it against a public, decentralized registry.”

Cristina Zubillaga, Executive Director of AGESIC, framed the ambition in the case study documenting the pilot:

“No digital identity realizes its full value if it stops at the border.”

Not Your Typical Blockchain ID Project

Unlike prior blockchain-based digital identity projects, neither network stores personal data. What sits on-chain is trust metadata only: the identifiers and public keys of authorized issuers, and the revocation status of credentials.

Blockchain’s role here is strictly as a coordination layer, a shared registry every country can read from and write to without any single party controlling it. The credentials themselves stay with the individual.

John Nahas, Chief Business Officer of Ava Labs, the company behind Avalanche, said in a statement that the design reflects what he believes should be a first principle of government digital ID infrastructure:

“Governments should not have to replace their identity systems to make digital credentials work across borders. What they need is a common way to establish which issuers and credentials can be trusted.”

The AGESIC case study maps two additional structural problems the pilot addresses. First, private-sector verifiers that today receive only a binary yes-or-no response from a government API could gain direct access to the registry and apply their own compliance rules. Second, cached versions of the trusted list could let devices validate credentials offline at border crossings, hospitals, and airports where a live connection to the issuer is unavailable.

Going Global

In November 2025, the pilot took first place in the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure’s government hackathon at the Global DPI Summit in Cape Town.

Allende said the next step is a regional pilot that tests interoperability between countries and creates a public-good layer for digital ID.

Ideally, he said, this would create a “model for international interoperability between the US, Europe, and Latin America: how blockchain and smart contracts can enable countries to connect while each one keeps its own sovereign infrastructure.”

Robles Garay is encouraged that the private sector is helping build this infrastructure rather than waiting for public-sector directives. He has seen this pattern before.

“When the internet was developed, those protocols were built not by governments, but by individuals, companies, and universities,” he said.

“Our governments in Latin America were outside of the picture. This digital identity conversation is taking the same steps.”

If the pilot works, Latin America’s digital ID infrastructure may emerge the same way much of the internet did: not from a single central authority, but from shared protocols, interoperable networks, and institutions willing to trust the rails.