CADENA Act moves beyond blockchain in push for gov’t spending transparency

• Photo courtesy of Qadena Foundation Inc. Executive Director Gail Macapagal. (FB)

The proposed CADENA Act represents a shift from prescribing blockchain technology for government budget transparency toward building a broader system that allows the public to track, analyze, and verify how government funds are spent, according to Qadena Foundation Inc. Executive Director Gail Macapagal.

Macapagal said the measure evolved from Senate Bill No. 1330, or the Philippine National Budget Blockchain Act, which Sen. Bam Aquino filed on September 2, 2025.

The earlier proposal, widely referred to as the “Blockchain the Budget” bill, sought to establish a National Budget Blockchain System that would record budget transactions on a digital ledger, allowing allocations, releases, and expenditures to be traced.

However, discussions and public consultations surrounding the proposal raised a broader policy question over whether legislation should mandate a particular technology or instead establish the transparency standards that government systems must meet.

Aquino subsequently filed Senate Bill No. 1506, or the Citizens’ Access and Disclosure of Expenditures for National Accountability Act, known as the CADENA Act, on November 12, 2025, as a substitute for the earlier measure.

Macapagal said the change marked a significant shift in the proposed framework.

“The original bill anchored itself to a specific tool: blockchain. CADENA starts directly with the core problem: how do we make government spending genuinely easy for Filipinos to see, verify, and follow?” she said.

Moving beyond blockchain

Macapagal explained that blockchain still offers advantages for government transparency, including tamper resistance, cryptographic verification, auditability, and a permanent transaction record.

But she noted that the technology alone cannot guarantee that information entered into a system is accurate.

“While it can fiercely preserve a record, it cannot automatically verify whether the information initially keyed into that record is truthful,” Macapagal said.

Concerns were also raised during public hearings in October 2025 about potentially locking the government into a specific technology.

The resulting CADENA framework took a technology-neutral approach, focusing instead on requirements such as accessible information, structured data, traceability, tamper-evident records, interoperability, and timely public disclosure.

Macapagal said this approach would allow the government to use blockchain when appropriate without preventing agencies from adopting better technologies that may emerge in the future.

“If blockchain proves to be the best tool for a particular government function, use it. If a superior alternative emerges tomorrow, the government should be entirely free to adopt it instead,” she said.

“The ultimate objective is absolute transparency. Blockchain is simply one possible vehicle to get there.”

Making government data usable

Macapagal also highlighted CADENA’s emphasis on structured and machine-readable government information.

She said simply publishing documents online does not necessarily make government information useful to the public, particularly when records are difficult to search, compare, or analyze.

Under the proposed framework, open data formats such as CSV, JSON, and XML could allow government spending information to be processed by software and analyzed by journalists, watchdog groups, researchers, civil society organizations, and other members of the public.

Such a system could make it easier to search infrastructure projects by location, contractor, amount, or project type and connect budget allocations with procurement records, contracts, payments, and project implementation.

It could also expand the use of artificial intelligence and other analytical tools to examine large volumes of government spending data.

“Suddenly, the question shifts from a basic, ‘Can I see the document?’ To a transformative, ‘What insights emerge when we connect thousands of government data points together?’” Macapagal said.

Seven-day disclosure rule

Another provision highlighted by Macapagal is the proposed requirement for covered government documents to be published within seven working days.

She said the deadline could make transparency more useful by ensuring records become available while transactions and projects can still be scrutinized by journalists, watchdogs, and the public.

“Transparency that arrives too late is effectively toothless,” Macapagal said.

She added that setting a statutory deadline would give agencies a clear disclosure requirement and provide the public with a measurable standard for determining whether agencies are complying with the law.

From ledger to broader transparency system

While the original proposal centered on creating a trusted digital ledger for public spending, Macapagal said CADENA seeks to establish a wider transparency ecosystem connecting budget information, project documents, procurement records, contractor profiles, and expenditure histories.

This could allow individual government transactions to be examined in context rather than as isolated records.

Macapagal said connecting these datasets is particularly important because questionable transactions may not immediately stand out when viewed a lone line item.

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