Blockchain Tokens Could Pay Citizens to Green Their Cities, Simulation Finds

What if every kilometer you walked, cycled, or rode public transport to work earned you a digital token that could be spent on a museum ticket, a health checkup, or a discounted city tour? A new simulation study published in Mobile Networks and Applications suggests that this kind of cross-sector reward system, built on blockchain technology, could measurably shift how citizens move through cities, cutting carbon emissions while circulating economic value across health, culture, and tourism services. The research, led by Gordana Jotanovic of the University of East Sarajevo with colleagues from the University of Novi Sad and the University of Zagreb, offers one of the most concrete quantitative pictures yet of how distributed ledger technology might serve the ambitious sustainability agenda known as the Triple Bottom Line: people, planet, and profit, all at once.

The Triple Bottom Line framework, long a touchstone of sustainability policy, demands that interventions be judged simultaneously on ecological, economic, and social grounds. Most smart city technologies are evaluated on only one axis, typically efficiency or emissions. The research team set out to test whether a single technical architecture could deliver gains across all three dimensions. Their vehicle for doing so was a multisector platform that links sustainable urban mobility with health and cultural services through token-based incentives executed by smart contracts, the self-executing programs that run on blockchain networks and automatically enforce the rules of an agreement without intermediaries.

Technically, the study combines two modeling approaches that rarely appear together. The first is agent-based simulation, a computational technique in which thousands of individual virtual actors, each with its own behaviors and preferences, interact within a modeled environment and produce emergent system-level patterns. The researchers deployed 10,000 heterogeneous agents, meaning the simulated citizens differed from one another in their characteristics and travel choices, over a simulated 30-day period. The second layer was a simulated permissioned blockchain, a type of distributed ledger in which only approved participants can validate transactions. Permissioned designs are favored for municipal deployments because they offer the auditability and tamper resistance of blockchain while avoiding the enormous energy costs and throughput limits of public cryptocurrencies.

On top of this architecture, the team layered the incentive machinery. When an agent chose a sustainable transport mode, the platform recorded the corresponding green kilometers on the ledger, and smart contracts automatically issued tokens proportional to that distance. The tokens were not merely symbolic. In the most ambitious configuration, they could be redeemed for benefits in entirely different sectors: health services, cultural attractions, and tourism offerings. This is the crucial design insight of the study. Rather than treating green behavior as an isolated transaction between a citizen and a transport authority, the model turns sustainable mobility into a currency that flows through the whole urban economy, creating what the authors describe as value circulation across sectors.

To measure the effect, the researchers compared three scenarios over the same simulated month. The first was a baseline with no incentives at all, representing business as usual in a city without behavioral nudges. The second was a linear incentive model in which tokens simply rewarded green transport choices one-to-one, with no cross-sector redemption. The third was the full cross-sector ecosystem model, in which green kilometers unlocked health, cultural, and tourism benefits. This experimental design allowed the team to isolate not just whether token incentives work, but whether connecting them to multiple city services amplifies their impact.

The results, according to the study, show that token-based incentives can increase the use of sustainable transport modes and reduce CO2 emissions relative to the unincentivized baseline. More strikingly, the cross-sector scenario achieved the strongest ecological, economic, and social effects of the three configurations. In other words, the simple act of letting green mobility tokens purchase cultural and health benefits made the whole system perform better on every dimension of the Triple Bottom Line than rewards confined to the transport sector alone. The authors interpret this as evidence that blockchain can support sustainability by connecting emission reduction, automated value distribution, and citizen-oriented services within a unified smart city ecosystem.

The ecological mechanism is straightforward: if enough agents switch from cars to walking, cycling, or public transport, aggregate emissions fall. The economic mechanism is subtler and arguably more interesting. Because tokens are issued and redeemed automatically through smart contracts, value generated by green behavior does not sit idle; it is routed to local health providers, cultural institutions, and tourism operators, multiplying the economic footprint of each sustainable trip. The social dimension emerges from citizen participation itself, as residents gain tangible, immediate benefits from choices that normally pay off only in distant, abstract terms such as future air quality or climate targets.

The study sits within a rapidly growing body of research on blockchain in urban systems. Prior work has explored distributed ledgers for secure electric vehicle charging, dynamic key management in intelligent transportation, sharing-economy services, and even the provenance of cultural heritage assets. Surveys of smart contract applications have catalogued both the opportunities and the technical challenges, including scalability, privacy, and governance. What distinguishes the new study is its integration of these threads into a single multisector platform and its insistence on evaluating the outcome against a three-dimensional sustainability framework rather than a single performance metric. The authors also build on their own earlier work, including a sustainable transport model based on blockchain presented at the EAI International Conference on Future Access Enablers, and research on optimizing urban air pollution measurement stations using graph clustering.

As with any simulation, the findings come with inherent caveats that the authors’ methodology makes explicit. Agent-based models are only as good as their behavioral assumptions, and real citizens respond to incentives in ways that are messier than any 10,000-agent abstraction can capture. The blockchain layer was simulated rather than deployed, so questions of real-world throughput, latency, energy consumption, and integration with existing municipal IT systems remain open. The study also reports that no datasets were generated or analysed during the research, underscoring that the contribution is a proof of concept at the modeling stage rather than a field trial. Nonetheless, simulations of this kind are a standard and valuable step between theoretical proposals and costly pilot deployments, allowing planners to stress-test incentive designs before committing public money.

The implications for city governments are nonetheless significant. Cities worldwide are already experimenting with mobility credits, low-emission zones, and app-based rewards, but these schemes typically operate in silos, with transport rewards locked inside transport apps. The study’s central lesson is that the architecture connecting these silos matters: a permissioned blockchain with smart contracts can serve as the trust layer that lets a green kilometer earned on a bike lane become a cinema ticket or a physiotherapy session, automatically and transparently. If future real-world pilots confirm the simulation’s promise, the humble commuter token could evolve into a genuine urban currency for sustainability, one that pays citizens for building a greener, healthier, and more culturally vibrant city every time they leave the car at home.

Subject of Research: Blockchain-based token incentives for Triple Bottom Line sustainability in smart city ecosystems

Article Title: Simulation of Blockchain Supporting Triple Bottom Line Sustainability in Smart City Ecosystems

Article References: Jotanovic, G., Dobrilovic, D., Jausevac, G., Perakovic, D., Brtka, V., & Stojanov, Z. (2026). Simulation of Blockchain Supporting Triple Bottom Line Sustainability in Smart City Ecosystems. Mobile Networks and Applications. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-026-02537-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11036-026-02537-1

Keywords: blockchain, smart cities, triple bottom line, sustainable mobility, token incentives, smart contracts, agent-based simulation, CO2 emissions, urban sustainability, permissioned blockchain, green transport, cross-sector ecosystem