By Ann Cuisia, January 15, 2025

Recent statements from the Department of Information and Communications Technology and members of Congress about putting the national budget process “on blockchain” were meant to project progress, transparency, and trust. Instead, they revealed two separate but related problems: a weak grasp of cybersecurity, and a shallow view of how blockchain should be used in government.

Both deserve to be discussed plainly.

The “101% Hack-Free” Problem

The claim that blockchain systems are “101% hack-free” immediately raised alarms within the IT and cybersecurity community.

No serious security professional speaks that way. No system is invulnerable.

Over the past decade, blockchain ecosystems have suffered repeated, high-profile failures. 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.  In March 2022, hackers stole nearly $615 million from the Ronin bridge linked to Axie Infinity.  In August 2021, the Poly Network exploit moved over $610 million in assets across chains.  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.

That is why cybersecurity is treated as risk management. It is about limiting exposure, detecting breaches quickly, minimizing blast radius, and designing for recovery. It is not built on absolute guarantees.

When a government agency uses “101% hack-free” language, it does not reassure experts. It creates doubt about whether risk is being taken seriously.

Blockchain and the Misuse of Transparency

Separate from security is how blockchain is being framed as a transparency tool.

When officials say the budget will be “on blockchain,” 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.

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.