Senator Bam Aquino of the Philippines has expressed his intent to introduce a bill aimed at storing the national budget on a blockchain.
According to a Facebook post by local news outlet BusinessWorld, Aquino is set to file the bill “in the next couple of weeks.” This legislation would “integrate the government’s budget and transactions into a blockchain framework for enhanced transparency.”
In a focused Facebook update, Aquino highlighted discussions on how technology could “enhance accountability in governance” during the Manila Tech Summit 2025, specifically mentioning blockchain technology:
“I also talked about innovations like blockchain-based budgeting to ensure that every peso is transparent and accountable. Utilizing blockchain for our budget guarantees public awareness of every peso’s allocation.“Local coverage of Aquino’s statements by local TV news channel Bilyonaryo. Source: YouTube
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The Philippines’ expanding blockchain adoption
This initiative is not the first in the Philippines. In late July, the government launched a blockchain-based document validation system on Polygon, despite experiencing a partial outage on the same day.
The developments followed efforts by the local nonprofit Blockchain Council of the Philippines (BCP), which collaborated with the Department of Information and Communications Technology to promote local blockchain adoption through a state partnership in 2023. In an interview with Cointelegraph that summer, BCP founder Donald Lim stated that the Philippines was primed for blockchain integration:
“We strongly believe that we can become the blockchain capital of Asia.”
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Increasing government blockchain adoption
The move towards blockchain by governments, primarily for the purpose of ensuring transparency through immutable records, is gaining momentum. Earlier this month, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that the Department of Commerce will begin publishing economic statistics, including gross domestic product data, on-chain.
This initiative follows prior state efforts in the US, such as a New Jersey county tokenizing $240 billion in property deeds or a proposal in New York to explore how blockchain could safeguard voter records and election results. A similar initiative was replicated in India, where a town’s administration digitized all land records dating back to the 1950s and stored them on the Avalanche blockchain.
Additionally, Vietnam recently introduced a national blockchain platform aimed at verifying digital transactions and records across various sectors.
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