Mihajlo Atanackovic, Director of Digital and Information Technology at the World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM), worked from late 2022 through May 2023 building blockchain-based credential infrastructure for one of the largest youth organizations on earth. As a member of the Ethereum Foundation's Next Billion Fellowship Cohort 2, Atanackovic is developing a digital wallet system called ScoutPass, designed to issue verifiable badges and identity credentials to scouts across more than 170 countries. Ethereum Foundation and WOSM materials describe the project's membership scope as more than 57 million people, though the 2023 WOSM census recorded 51.4 million registered members, with the organization projecting growth to 60 million by 2025. The project has particular relevance in regions where institutional record-keeping is inconsistent or inaccessible.

The effort began publicly in October 2022, when WOSM minted the first World Scouting NFT badge through POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) during JOTA-JOTI, an annual online jamboree that is the world's largest digital scouting event. The badge ran on Ethereum's proof-of-stake blockchain, a detail WOSM highlighted intentionally: the network had just completed its transition away from energy-intensive mining, and the organization framed the choice as consistent with scouting's environmental values. POAP, which migrated from Ethereum mainnet to Gnosis Chain to reduce transaction costs, had issued more than 6.7 million tokens from over 37,000 unique issuers by mid-2023.

The Scout's Passport is the broader identity concept that Atanackovic describes as "the first foundational layer of World Scouting's Web3 vision, an identity system compatible with all sorts of Web3 systems." Its MVP release takes the form of a wallet branded as ScoutPass, built on LearnCard, an open-source wallet SDK from the Learning Economy Foundation. The technical foundation uses W3C Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), open standards that allow credentials to be verified without relying on any single institution's database. The wallet supports digital badges, soulbound tokens (non-transferable tokens that represent verified achievements and cannot be sold or transferred between accounts), peer recognition tools, DAO-based group formation, and eventually governance and crowdfunding features. A version of the wallet designed specifically for young users is also part of the roadmap. An MVP was planned for the 25th World Scout Jamboree in Saemangeum, South Korea, which ran from August 1 to 12, 2023, and drew roughly 43,000 scouts from 158 countries. That event was significantly disrupted by a heat wave, flooding, and Typhoon Khanun, which resulted in the partial evacuation of attendees; whether the ScoutPass launch proceeded as planned has not been confirmed in post-event reporting. ScoutPass's live metrics page showed 233,390 badges issued, 41,743 app users, and 48,507 peer recognition badges shared as of March 2026.

The regional stakes are significant. Africa is the fastest-growing scouting region globally, with membership up 95.9 percent in recent years. Nigeria's National Scout Organization is now the second-largest in the world, with 2.3 million members; Kenya's is third, at 2.2 million. For scouts in these countries, a portable digital credential that does not depend on government databases or paper records addresses a concrete problem. The World Economic Forum projects 230 million digital jobs in Africa by 2030, and a blockchain-anchored credential for skills earned through scouting could carry real labor market value, particularly where institutional certificates may be difficult to verify. The practical barriers are real as well: in Eastern and Southern Africa, only about 24 percent of the population actively uses the internet, and smartphone access, wallet onboarding, and gas fees remain friction points that any mobile-first design will need to address directly.

In South Asia, India's Bharat Scouts and Guides added more than 672,000 members in the most recent census cycle. The Asia-Pacific region overall accounts for 37.2 million of WOSM's members, making it the organization's largest. ScoutPass's use of open standards could allow it to sit alongside India's existing digital public infrastructure, including the Aadhaar identity stack and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) ecosystem, though no such integration has been announced. For students in rural areas, where institutional certificates can be difficult to transfer or verify, a portable digital credential system carries practical appeal.

Atanackovic's own background connects directly to the project's core purpose. He found scouting through a Yahoo search in 1996 while growing up in Serbia during a period of conflict and regional isolation, a path that mirrors the project's central argument that digital infrastructure can connect young people to institutions regardless of geography. The Ethereum Foundation's Next Billion program was built around exactly this thesis, funding fellows working on agricultural finance in India, informal savings groups in Mexico and Venezuela, housing access in Guatemala, and blockchain infrastructure for conflict zones in Syria, alongside the scouting project. If ScoutPass reaches meaningful scale, it would represent one of the largest real-world deployments of soulbound token technology to date, and a working reference point for other NGOs or governments exploring credential systems in regions where traditional record-keeping infrastructure is thin.

Editor's note: Verse Press is seeking confirmation from WOSM on the ScoutPass deployment status at the 25th World Scout Jamboree. Current live metrics are available at scout.org/scoutpass; figures cited in this article were retrieved in March 2026.