Philippine Senator Bam Aquino has declared his intent to propose legislation aimed at integrating the country’s national budget onto a blockchain.
As reported in a Facebook post by local news outlet BusinessWorld, Aquino plans to introduce the bill “in the next couple of weeks.” This initiative is designed to “integrate the government’s budget and transactions into a blockchain platform for enhanced transparency.”
In a focused Facebook post, Aquino highlighted that he discussed how technology can “enhance accountability in governance” during the Manila Tech Summit 2025. He noted his specific mention of blockchain technology:
“I also talked about innovations like blockchain-based budgeting to make every peso transparent and accountable. By using blockchain for our budget, we can ensure people know where every peso goes.“
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The Philippines’ growing blockchain adoption
This is not the first effort of its kind in the Philippines. At the end of July, the Philippine government initiated a blockchain-based document validation system on Polygon, despite the network experiencing a partial outage on the same day.
These developments align with the efforts of the local nonprofit Blockchain Council of the Philippines (BCP), which teamed up with the Department of Information and Communications Technology to promote local blockchain adoption through a state partnership in 2023. In a summer interview with Cointelegraph, BCP founder Donald Lim asserted that the Philippines is poised to embrace blockchain:
“We feel very strongly that we can be the blockchain capital of Asia.”
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Blockchain adoption by governments keeps growing
The trend of government adoption of blockchain, primarily focused on ensuring transparency through always-available and immutable records, is gaining momentum. Earlier this month, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that the Department of Commerce will start publishing economic statistics, including gross domestic product data, onchain.
This initiative follows previous state efforts in the US, such as a New Jersey county tokenizing $240 billion worth of property deeds or a New York Assembly member proposing to explore how blockchain could safeguard voter records and election results. A similar effort in India saw a town digitize its land records dating back to the 1950s and store them on the Avalanche blockchain.
Another recent example is Vietnam’s launch of a national blockchain platform aimed at verifying digital transactions and records across various sectors last month.
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