Barcelona, Spain — 3rd February 2026, 3 PM CET — At a moment when humanitarian organizations worldwide face intensifying pressure over aid accountability, Creu Roja (Spanish Red Cross) has deployed a blockchain-based digital payments platform that delivers complete financial transparency to donors without compromising the privacy or dignity of vulnerable recipients, replacing manual and paper-based processes.
The platform, developed in collaboration with Barcelona-based technical infrastructure company BLOOCK, digitizes the entire aid lifecycle from donation to disbursement to create an immutable audit trail while ensuring no personal data ever touches the public blockchain. Unlike some blockchain-based initiatives that rely on biometric identifiers or invasive data collection, the Creu Roja platform’s design verifies outcomes without recording who received the aid.
“People seeking assistance shouldn’t have to choose between getting help and protecting their privacy. We designed this system so donors can verify their contributions made a real difference, and beneficiaries can access support without fear of being tracked, profiled, or stigmatized” said Francisco López Romero, CTO at Creu Roja, Catalunya.
The deployment arrives amid growing scrutiny of international aid delivery, as affected communities increasingly identify corruption, favouritism, and lack of transparency as barriers to effective assistance. Blockchain solutions have emerged as a potential fix, yet most implementations require beneficiaries to surrender sensitive personal data, often including biometrics, raising concerns from privacy advocates that the cure may create new risks, with even well-intentioned projects at risk of exposing vulnerable populations to surveillance, profiling, and discrimination. Creu Roja’s blockchain serves purely as a verification layer, anchoring cryptographic proofs of transactions without storing any identifying information.
The platform replaces paper-based workflows and traditional prepaid cards with a digital system that separates what donors need to know from what they don’t. Recipients receive digital aid credits deposited to a personal mobile wallet, requiring no bank account or credit history. preserving dignity and reducing barriers to access. These credits are spent at authorized local merchants via QR code in transactions indistinguishable from any normal purchase. There are no special “aid cards” or other instruments that mark someone publicly as a recipient.
Donors and administrators get real-time visibility into aggregated aid flows showing how much was allocated, how much was spent, and where funds went. An immutable audit trail anchored on a public blockchain provides cryptographic proof that every euro reached authorized purposes, while giving zero access to individual recipient identities.
“The architecture follows a principle we apply across all our enterprise deployments: blockchain should certify truth, not store content. Every transaction generates a cryptographic proof that’s permanently anchored and independently verifiable, but the proof contains no personal information,” said Lluís Llibre, CEO of BLOOCK
To date, the BLOOCK platform has processed more than 952,000 cryptographic transactions and over 257,000 data validations. The project was recognized with the Talent Chamber Award in the Innovation category in 2020, jointly awarded by the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and Welcome Talent Society.
From an architectural perspective, RedChain implements a hybrid trust model, with beneficiary information, such as names, contact details, and case records remaining entirely off-chain in Creu Roja’s controlled systems. Aid credits exist as ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum smart contracts, representing allocated funds without identifying their holders. When transactions occur, only hashes, timestamps, and integrity anchors are written to the public blockchain, while actual spending records stay in off-chain databases with corresponding on-chain verification hashes. The complete audit trail can be reconstructed from on-chain proofs without ever exposing personal data.
The technology stack includes Ethereum for public blockchain anchoring, Solidity smart contracts for ERC-20 based credit issuance, a Go backend with REST API, Angular for administrative and merchant web interfaces, Ionic for the mobile wallet, and role-based access control with digital signatures throughout. This architecture ensures that even if external systems were compromised, the blockchain itself contains no exploitable personal information.
“What Creu Roja built here is a credential system, not a surveillance system. Recipients hold proof of their eligibility in their own wallet. They present it when needed, reveal nothing else, and move on with their lives. That’s how identity should work everywhere and especially in humanitarian and public-interest systems. You own your credentials, you decide what to share, and no one builds a profile on you without your consent,” said Evin McMullen, CEO & Co-Founder, Billions Network
The BLOOCK’s approach demonstrates how humanitarian organizations can combine accountability, privacy, and digital efficiency without introducing new risks for the people they serve.
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About Billions
Billions.Network (formerly Polygon ID) is the leading human and AI verification platform, built on mobile-first verification to scale the internet of value globally. Created by the stewards of the world’s leading zero-knowledge verification framework, Circom, Billions secures the work of major organizations and blockchain ecosystems serving over 150 million users globally. The platform provides privacy-preserving digital identity solutions that work across both Web2 and Web3 applications.
For more information, visit https://billions.network
BLOOCK is an innovative software platform that integrates enterprise IT systems with blockchain technology in a fast, secure, and cost-effective manner. Founded in Barcelona in 2020, BLOOCK has deployed solutions for clients across pharmaceuticals, healthcare, financial services, education, and logistics — making blockchain’s benefits accessible without technical complexity. BLOOCK’s framework supports the five pillars of information security: integrity, authenticity, availability, confidentiality, and non-repudiation.
For more information, visit https://bloock.com or write to [email protected]
Creu Roja (Spanish Red Cross) is a voluntary humanitarian institution serving as the Spanish affiliate of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Founded in 1864, it operates at local, provincial, regional, and national levels across Spain, providing emergency healthcare, social inclusion services, employment support, and disaster response.
