Filipino senator BAM Aquino wants the country’s national budget to be placed on a blockchain platform, a movement that he said would make every peso traceable by citizens.
“Nobody is crazy enough to put their transactions on blockchain, where every step of the road is recorded and transparent for every citizen. But we want to start,” Aquino said in one rack held on the Manila Tech Summit on Wednesday.
“If we can do this, I think we are the first country that our budget has on the blockchain,” Aquino said, adding that he is not sure what kind of support he would receive.
At the time of writing, there was no formal proposal for a blockchain-driven budget management system scaled up for the entire national budget of the country. Representatives of Senator Aquino do not return immediately Decrypts Request for comments.
But once formalized, Senator Aquino’s plan would build on the Department of Budget and Management’s existing blockchain platformwho already registers financial documents and is the first live budget platform for chains in Asia.
Bayanichain, the local blockchain infrastructure company behind the on-chain platform of the DBM, welcomed Aquino’s comments but clarified that it was not directly involved with the senator.
“His vision is in line with ours: creating more transparent and responsible systems for the Philippines,” said Paul Soliman, co-founder and CEO of Bayanichain, said Decrypt. “Although Blockchain is not a silver bullet against corruption, it creates unchanging records that ensure accountability of government officials.”
Soliman said that the role of Bayanichain is to offer the technology that links the internal system of the budget and management department to a public blockchain.
With this installation, important budget documents, such as special allocation release orders (SAROs) and notifications of Cash Allocation (NCAS), can be published online and verified online, with the records that are secured on-chain.
Prismo, an orchestration layer, manages data processing, coding and validation. The DBM budget platform uses Polygon’s Proof-of-stake Network, an Ethereum scale solution that is fully compatible with the virtual Ethereum machine, as the consensus and transparency layer.