The 39 Small Island Developing States recognised by the United Nations share a structural condition. They have small domestic markets, narrow export bases, constrained fiscal positions, and acute climate exposure. They also share thin financial infrastructure, and between 2018 and 2026 that thinness made them an unwilling test bed for blockchain-related sovereign experiments. This paper does not propose specific projects. It asks a different question. Given the poor empirical record of those experiments, and given the reorganisation of the global financial system in 2026 around tokenised settlement, wholesale CBDC, regulated stablecoin frameworks, and verifiable digital identity, what does a serious blockchain ecosystem agenda for SIDS actually look like? The paper proceeds region by region — Caribbean, Pacific, AIS — through the documented record, with a cross-cutting reading of the adoption-mechanic and value-capture lessons. It surveys the institutional context being built elsewhere, describes the geopolitical configuration of that surface descriptively rather than prescriptively, identifies opportunities and challenges presented to small island jurisdictions, and closes with unresolved questions — including on legal infrastructure, education and capacity-building, execution sequencing and off-ramp planning, and the realistic economic prize of well-executed engagement. We do not propose pilots. We propose questions.
The full text — region-by-region empirical record, the institutional context being built elsewhere, the geopolitical configuration of that surface, the nine candidate opportunities, the eleven structural constraints, the six-layer alignment requirement, and the unresolved questions — is in the PDF below.
Boli Association, Tenzro Network, & Tenzro Labs Pte. Ltd. (2026, May). Designing blockchain ecosystems for Small Island Developing States in 2026: Institutional surface, geopolitical configuration, and architectural layering. Boli Association working paper. Zurich.