Overview
Qore3, a Singapore-based digital asset infrastructure company, and the Gyalpozhing College of Information Technology (GCIT), part of the Royal University of Bhutan, have committed to a long-term partnership to explore practical uses of blockchain in a rural Himalayan setting. Formalised via a memorandum of understanding signed during TOKEN2049 Week, the collaboration centres on Project Digital Village, a field-driven programme aimed at demonstrating how distributed ledger technologies can be applied to community finance and agricultural transactions in Rukha Village.
What Project Digital Village will do
The first applied research activity under the partnership will work directly with 21 households in Rukha, a farming community in Wangdue Phodrang district. The project will deploy multi-party computation - MPC - wallet solutions to those households, introduce digital liquidity through a model based on a utility token, and run a pilot of AI-assisted digital wallets. The goal is to test whether decentralised tools can be designed and governed on the terms of the community and whether such tools can support local livelihoods and the routine agricultural transactions residents undertake.
Local context and partners
The selection of Rukha carries symbolic weight: it was the initial site of an integrated community development initiative organised by the Tarayana Foundation. The foundation, established in 2003 by Her Majesty Queen Mother Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, expanded its integrated development work to more than 150 villages across Bhutan. Tarayana is a partner in the digital village project, which also includes academic collaboration with Switzerland’s Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU).
Project Digital Village brings together industry practitioners, educators and researchers to develop tangible distributed ledger use cases. The arrangement extends a relationship between Qore3 and GCIT that began in early 2025 with capacity development, curriculum design and talent recruitment. The recently signed MOU signals an intent to broaden those activities into sustained advocacy, creation and adoption of blockchain solutions within Bhutan.
Fieldwork, workshops and technical groundwork
Fieldwork for the initiative began in August 2026. Researchers from GCIT and Tarayana visited Rukha, accompanied by GCIT President Audrey Low and Qore3 Head of Partnerships Jeffrey Cheong, to assess local needs and observe existing community practices. Following that visit, Mr Cheong led a workshop at GCIT on multi-agent AI development for faculty and students. The workshop is described as part of the groundwork for white-label technology stacks that will underpin the project’s tools.
Qore3’s role emphasises practical infrastructure: the company provides a non-custodial MPC wallet with role-based controls and approval thresholds, multi-chain treasury operations and agentic-ready workflows that manage automated actions within scoped, policy-bound and auditable frameworks. Those product attributes are presented as the institutional-grade capabilities Qore3 brings to the pilot and to wider capacity-building activities.
Education, inclusion and trust
Project Digital Village includes an explicit focus on education and inclusion. GCIT President Audrey Low framed the initiative as an attempt to simplify highly technical subjects so they can be more broadly understood. As she said, "Blockchain and digital assets are highly technical subjects that few people grasp in a single session. The goal of Project Digital Village is to simplify the technology and make education and tech inclusion accessible to everyone, creating social impact at the edge of a fast-moving digital economy."
Qore3 Director Ong Zhen Guang articulated the project’s design constraint: technologies must be easy to use, controls clear and trust earned at the household level. "Most of the digital asset industry is built for institutions in financial centres. Project Digital Village asks a harder question: what does it look like when it’s built for a village? The technology has to be simple, the controls have to be clear, and trust has to be earned one household at a time. That discipline will make us better at what we build, and at how we collaborate with institutions like GCIT."
Public launch and related events
The memorandum of understanding was signed at Digital After Hours, a networking evening hosted by Qore3 at CHIJMES during TOKEN2049 Week. The event also included a panel discussion on building trusted infrastructure for institutional crypto featuring representatives from Chainalysis, NEAR Foundation, Kiln and Failsafe.
Institutional descriptions
Qore3 is described as a Singapore-based digital asset infrastructure firm that helps institutions access, secure and operate on-chain holdings. The company’s platform combines non-custodial MPC wallets with role-based controls, approval thresholds, multi-chain treasury operations and agentic-ready workflows. Qore3 positions itself as serving institutions and funds, fintechs, payment platforms and developers, and notes membership in the Singapore FinTech Association.
GCIT is identified as a college of the Royal University of Bhutan and the country’s leading institute for computer science, cyber security and digital innovation. Based in Kabesa, Thimphu, and explicitly rooted in the values of Gross National Happiness, GCIT delivers programmes through its School of Future Computing and School of Interactive Design and Development. The college integrates real-world industry projects, technopreneurship and applied research into its curriculum, an orientation that underpins its role in Project Digital Village.
Contacts
Media contact: [email protected]
Head of Partnerships: Jeffrey Cheong, Qore3 - [email protected]
Project Digital Village is presented as a cooperative applied research and education effort. The initiative will track whether blockchain-based tools, delivered through community-first design and supported by local education, can be used by rural households for agricultural transactions and local liquidity management without imposing institutional-first assumptions.