In brief
- Senator Bam Aquino called for budget transactions to be recorded on-chain.
- A formal bill proposing the measure is yet to be filed.
- Blockchain solutions aren’t “a silver bullet against corruption,” a local blockchain infrastructure firm told Decrypt.
Philippine Senator Bam Aquino wants the country’s national budget placed on a blockchain platform, a move he said would make every peso spent traceable by citizens.
“No one is crazy enough to put their transactions on blockchain, where every single step of the way will be logged and transparent to every single citizen. But we want to start,” Aquino said in a statement at the Manila Tech Summit held on Wednesday.
“If we’re able to do this, I think we’ll be the first country to have our budget on the blockchain,” Aquino said, adding he’s unsure what kind of support he’d receive.
At the time of writing, no formal proposal on a blockchain-powered budget management system scaled for the country’s entire national budget has been filed. Representatives for Senator Aquino did not immediately return Decrypt’s request for comment.
But once formalized, Senator Aquino’s plan would build upon the Department of Budget and Management’s existing blockchain platform, which already records select financial documents and is the first live on-chain budget platform in Asia.
BayaniChain, the local blockchain infrastructure firm behind the DBM’s on-chain platform, welcomed Aquino’s remarks but clarified it is not directly involved with the senator.
“His vision aligns with ours: creating more transparent and accountable systems for the Philippines,” Paul Soliman, co-founder and CEO of BayaniChain, told Decrypt. “While blockchain is not a silver bullet against corruption, it creates immutable records that ensure accountability from government officials.”
Soliman said BayaniChain’s role is to provide the technology that links the Department of Budget and Management’s internal system to a public blockchain.
This setup allows key budget documents, such as Special Allotment Release Orders (SAROs) and Notices of Cash Allocation (NCAs), to be published and verified online, with the records secured on-chain.
Prismo, an orchestration layer, manages data handling, encryption, and validation. The DBM’s budget platform uses Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake network, an Ethereum scaling solution fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, as its consensus and transparency layer.
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