Jesús Cepeda, Ph.D., a Monterrey-born technologist and co-founder and CEO of OS City, has spent nearly a decade trying to fix one of Latin America's most stubborn problems: governments that cannot talk to each other and citizens who pay the price.

His answer is Soberana, an Ethereum-compatible digital identity wallet that lets people store, present, and renew official government documents without standing in line or bribing a clerk. As of mid-2022, pilots were underway in Mexico at the municipal level and in two Argentine cities, Mar del Plata and Berisso, as part of a broader push to test whether blockchain-based credentials can survive real-world civic conditions.

The problem Soberana is built to address is not abstract. Mexico scored 26 out of 100 on the 2023 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, placing it among the least transparent countries globally. More striking: 51 percent of Mexicans reported paying a bribe to access basic public services in survey data from Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer.

The friction is structural. Citizens routinely carry redundant paper documents across disconnected agencies, with no shared verification layer between them. Cepeda, who has been implementing blockchain projects in the Latin American public sector since 2017, frames the problem as one of interoperability as much as corruption. The OS City product philosophy holds that removing the human intermediary from routine document approvals removes much of the incentive for rent-seeking behavior.

Soberana is built on EVM-compatible chains (networks that run the same smart contract code as Ethereum) using interoperable components aligned with open standards. The architecture is designed to split control deliberately: governments retain the authority to approve and issue records, but citizens hold their own credentials and can port them across agencies without requesting re-issuance. Documents supported at launch included commercial permits, construction permits, inspector credentials, and tax statements. Citizens access the system through a government-run online portal rather than a consumer app, which keeps institutional legitimacy intact. Cepeda is a first-cohort fellow in the Ethereum Foundation's "Next Billion" Fellowship, a program targeting builders embedding Ethereum in governance, healthcare, agriculture, and finance across emerging economies.

The moment of Soberana's wider public visibility coincided with a significant regulatory milestone. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ratified Decentralized Identifiers version 1.0 as a full web standard on July 19, 2022. DIDs are unique identifiers that individuals or organizations can control without relying on a central registry. The W3C's approval statement described the specification as "technically sound, mature, and ready for widespread adoption," giving projects like Soberana a standardization foundation that earlier blockchain identity experiments lacked. Developers building on EVM chains can plug into this globally recognized standard, lowering the cost of replicating or adapting the OS City model in other jurisdictions.

Argentina was generating parallel signals at the same time. The City of Buenos Aires launched TangoID in August 2022, a separate self-sovereign identity initiative anchored in Starknet (an Ethereum Layer 2 network) with identifiers recorded at Ethereum's base layer for security. Buenos Aires also announced plans in August 2022 to run Ethereum validator nodes at two municipal data centers, a move that, if completed, would potentially make it one of the first cities in the world to operate public Ethereum infrastructure.

OS City's municipal pilots and Buenos Aires's city-level blockchain integration each represented distinct technical and institutional approaches to a common aspiration: government-issued identity that citizens actually control.

The stakes reach beyond Latin America. More than 30 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean lack a government-issued ID entirely. About 122 million people in the region, roughly 26 percent of the population, remained unbanked as of 2021, a number directly tied to identity barriers. Chile's ClaveÚnica platform offered a useful regional benchmark: as of 2022, it counted 14 million active users, demonstrating that scaled civic digital identity was achievable within the region itself. Internet penetration across Latin America reached 78 percent by 2022, creating the infrastructure conditions for a digital credential rollout. The pattern maps closely onto Sub-Saharan Africa, where 57 percent of the population was unbanked as of 2021, and onto South Asia, where India's centralized Aadhaar system enrolls 1.4 billion people but carries well-documented concerns about surveillance and single points of failure. OS City's citizen-held credential model offers a structurally different approach, one that civic tech teams in Lagos, Nairobi, or Dhaka could adapt to local conditions using the same EVM tooling.

OS City has raised approximately $1.59 million across multiple funding rounds and counts UNICEF Innovation, the Ethereum Foundation, and the IDB Lab (DiDi Project) among its backers. It holds a spot on the World's GovTech Top 100 list. Soberana does not involve a native token or publicly traded asset; the product operates at the credential layer rather than the financial layer, which keeps the regulatory surface small and the use case concrete. As of mid-2022, the measure of success ahead was whether the Argentine and Mexican pilots would produce adoption data strong enough to push the model to additional municipalities, and whether the ratified W3C standard would create the interoperability layer needed to make cross-border credential portability a realistic goal.