Tech experts discuss ‘myths’ on blockchaining nat’l budget

Last week, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) launched the “Digital Bayanihan Chain,” making the Philippines the first country in the world to put its national budget on blockchain beginning with the P6.793-trillion 2026 General Appropriations Act (GAA). 

Blockchain is defined as an immutable or unchangeable and tamper-proof digital ledger or record of all transactions within a network.

DICT Secretary Henry Aguda said that with the national budget now on blockchain, “every peso of Filipino taxpayers’ money is recorded in a permanent and tamper-resistant digital ledger.”

Aguda, moreover, said that blockchaining the budget would mean reduced corruption with a tamper-proof system which makes fraudulent manipulations nearly impossible; clear tracking of public funds with citizens, media, and watchdogs can trace the flow of funds from approval to spending; evidence across administrations, meaning that records remain intact even when governments change; and stronger public trust, resulting from confidence in the government growing “when the truth is verifiable.”

While the government touted the initiative as an anti-corruption, transparency, and public accessibility effort, tech experts expressed their reservations as they “debunked” misconceptions about blockchain.

EXPLAINER: What is blockchain and how is it expected to stop corruption? 

Traxion Tech/Traxion Pay Inc. founder and CEO Ann Cuisia clarified that blockchain, while being campaigned as a transparency tool, “what is often being described is the archiving or tokenization of PDF documents, sometimes by placing document hashes on a blockchain and calling it transparency.”

“That approach misses where accountability actually comes from. Blockchain’s value in governance is not document storage. It is event recording: approvals, releases, obligations created, funds moved, and the rules or authorities that triggered those actions. A document hash only tells you a file existed at a certain time. It does not show who approved a release, why it was approved, what checks were applied, or how money moved after,” Cuisia said.

“Anyone familiar with government processes knows that wrongdoing rarely hides in the PDF itself. It hides in the decision trail, the discretion, the delays, the manual overrides, and the gray areas between steps. If the goal is genuine transparency, the focus should be on making actions traceable: who acted, when they acted, and what consequence followed. Documents can live in regular archives. What deserves immutability is the action trail and fund movements,” she said.

Scam Watch Pilipinas co-founder Art Samaniego, an IT expert and technology journalist, had earlier said that “while blockchain is indeed tamper-proof, it is blind to truth… it preserves what’s entered, but cannot verify whether it’s honest.”

Samaniego said that “if padded project, ghost spending, or false invoice is uploaded, the system immortalizes the lie. Garbage in, permanent record out.”

The Scam Watch co-founder further raised the issue of validators who “in theory… are the ones who check records before adding them to the chain.”

“But who are they? Which agency? Which company? The real power in a blockchain system rests with whoever controls the validators. If a single agency or private provider controls who becomes a validator, decentralization collapses," Samaniego said.

Likewise, Ton Patron, Head of Partnerships and Business Development  at Binance and Head of Fintech Solutions and Digital Partnerships at Sun Life, said that “if the goal is genuine transparency, the focus should be on making actions traceable: who acted, when they acted, and what consequence followed.”

“Documents can live in regular archives. What deserves immutability is the action trail and fund movements,” Patron said.

Traxion’s Cuisia further debunked that blockchain systems being claimed as “101% hack-free” is not true as “blockchain ecosystems have suffered repeated, high-profile failures.”

She cited incidents such as “in February 2025, crypto exchange Bybit disclosed that attackers gained control of an ether wallet and stole roughly $1.5 billion worth of crypto, one of the biggest known thefts in the sector.”

Cuisia added that in March 2022, “hackers stole nearly $615 million from the Ronin bridge linked to Axie Infinity,” while “in August 2021, the Poly Network exploit moved over $610 million in assets across chains.”

The Traxion CEO said that in February 2022, the Wormhole cross-chain bridge was hit by an exploit involving over $320 million in tokens.

“Those incidents span different architectures and failure points: wallet control, bridge security, smart contract vulnerabilities, validator/consensus risk, and cross-chain complexity. The details differ, but the lesson is consistent. There is always an attack surface somewhere, especially when systems interact with people, keys, and software,” she said.

For his part, economist and former National Economic and Development Authority chief Cielito Habito said that “no one will argue against stating that there is no such thing as ‘101% Hack-Free’.”

DVCode CEO Eliezer Rabadon said that “blockchain wasn't born from a need for better cybersecurity, it was born from a need for better money.”

“The architects of this industry weren't trying to patch a vulnerable server; they were solving a fundamental economic flaw. Between cryptography, P2P networking, and game theory, the goal wasn't just ‘security’ —it was sovereignty. It was about creating a system where math, not a government money printer, dictates value. They didn't build this to block hackers. They built this to opt out of a broken system,” said Rabadon. —LDF, GMA Integrated News