Philippine Senator Bam Aquino announced his intention to propose a bill that would lead to the country’s national budget being saved on a blockchain.
According to a Facebook post by local news publication BusinessWorld, Aquino plans to file the bill “in the next couple of weeks.” The measures would “integrate the government’s budget and transactions into a blockchain platform for better transparency.”
In a dedicated Facebook post, Aquino recounted that he talked about how technology can “strengthen accountability in governance” during the Manila Tech Summit 2025. He also said that he spoke about blockchain technology specifically:
“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 such initiative in the Philippines. At the end of July, the Philippine government launched a blockchain-based document validation system on Polygon, despite the network suffering a partial outage on the same day.
The developments followed the local nonprofit Blockchain Council of the Philippines (BCP), which partnered with the Department of Information and Communications Technology to lead local blockchain adoption through a state partnership in 2023. In an interview with Cointelegraph held that summer, BCP founder Donald Lim claimed that the Philippines was likely to adopt blockchain:
“We feel very strongly that we can be the blockchain capital of Asia.”
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Blockchain adoption by governments keeps growing
Government adoption of blockchain, primarily aimed at ensuring transparency by providing always-available and immutable records, is gaining traction. Earlier this month, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the Department of Commerce will begin publishing economic statistics, including gross domestic product data, onchain.
The initiative follows past US state initiatives, such as a New Jersey county tokenizing $240 billion worth of property deeds or a New York Assembly member proposing to evaluate how blockchain could help protect voter records and election results. A similar initiative to that in New York was also seen in India, where the administration of a town digitized all land records dating back to the 1950s and stored them on the Avalanche blockchain.
Another recent example is Vietnam’s launch of a national blockchain platform designed to verify digital transactions and records across various sectors last month.
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