Bhutan document photos online

In 2023 Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom of fewer than 800,000 people, became the first nation on Earth to issue a self-sovereign national digital identity at population scale - and its very first registered "digital citizen" was the infant crown prince, His Royal Highness The Gyalsey. Each Bhutanese now carries a biometric wallet that can prove a fact like "over 18" without revealing a birth date or surname. For a country that was the last on the planet to legalise television and the internet, both unbanned only in 1999, leapfrogging the world's richest states on digital ID is one of the great quiet surprises in the story of modern identity documents.

• Digital ID Bhutan became the world's first country to launch a self-sovereign national digital identity at population scale in September 2023, with credentials later anchored on public blockchains - its inaugural "digital citizen" was the newborn crown prince.
• Passport power The Bhutanese passport climbed to 84th on the Henley Passport Index in 2025, up from 87th, granting visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 51 destinations.
• Citizenship Bhutan forbids dual citizenship outright: under Article 6 of the 1985 Citizenship Act, any Bhutanese who acquires a foreign nationality automatically ceases to be a citizen.
• Currency The ngultrum, introduced in 1974 and split into 100 chetrum, takes its name from "ngul" (silver) and "trum" (coin), and is pegged one-to-one with the Indian rupee, which circulates freely inside Bhutan.
• Late connection Bhutan was the last country on Earth to permit television, lifting a ban only in 1999 to mark the king's silver jubilee - the same year it first switched on the public internet.
• Crypto reserve Using surplus hydropower, Bhutan quietly mined Bitcoin from 2019 and at one point held reserves worth close to 40 percent of its GDP - among the largest state Bitcoin holdings in the world relative to economy size.
• No traffic lights Thimphu is the world's only national capital with no traffic lights; signals briefly installed in the 1990s were removed after residents found them too impersonal, so white-gloved police still direct traffic by hand.
• Carbon negative With forests covering some 70 percent of its land, Bhutan absorbs more carbon than it emits, making it one of the world's only carbon-negative nations - and in 2015 a team of 100 volunteers planted a record 49,672 trees in a single hour.
• Sky-high airport Paro, Bhutan's only international airport, is wedged between 5,500-metre peaks and is so demanding that only a few dozen pilots worldwide are certified to land there, manually and without radar.