Eight months after the Senate acted, the bill that would let Filipinos follow their own money is still waiting in the House
By Ann Cuisia
Commentary | Status updated September 1, 2026
On September 23, 2025, I published an article titled “Why ‘Blockchaining the Budget’ Misses the Point.” It went viral enough to raise eyebrows across the technology community—especially among blockchain enthusiasts.
Some called me anti-blockchain. Others called me anti-technology.
That was amusing. I have advocated blockchain in the Philippines since 2017. My objection was never to the technology. It was to the idea that Congress should write a specific tool into law as though technology never changes.
A real technologist knows that tools evolve. A responsible lawmaker must legislate principles that endure.
Government should mandate traceability, integrity, public access, accountability and verifiability. It should not lock the country into one platform, one architecture or—worse—one future vendor. Blockchain may be an excellent tool for the job. It should earn its place on technical merit, not enjoy permanent protection through legislation.
That was the point many of my bashers missed. Technology was not being rejected. It was being protected from bad policymaking.
Nearly a year later, the argument is no longer academic. The original “Blockchain the Budget” proposal evolved into Senate Bill No. 1506, the Citizen Access and Disclosure of Expenditures for National Accountability Act—the CADENA Act.
The Senate approved it 17–0 on December 15, 2025. Yet as of today, the measure remains unfinished in the House of Representatives.
The uncomfortable question is no longer whether blockchain belongs in the law.
The question is: Who is afraid of a law that lets the public follow the money?
The first Senate public hearing on the original Senate Bill No. 1330 was held on October 2, 2025. Despite being a known blockchain proponent and one of the few industry voices publicly questioning the bill’s design, I was not invited.
I joined the process later. At the Technical Working Group meeting on October 23, I asked what I believed was the most difficult—and most necessary—question in the room:
Are we reviewing a bill or a terms of reference?
The draft looked less like a law establishing public rights and government duties and more like a technical specification for acquiring a particular kind of system. A law should say what the government must accomplish and what citizens are entitled to see. A terms of reference tells a supplier what to build.
Confusing the two could have created vendor bias, unnecessary cost and a law that would become obsolete as technology changed.
Between October 23 and the next public hearing on November 4, representatives and contributors from more than 50 organizations—technologists, lawyers, academics, professionals, civic groups and ordinary patriots—reviewed and proposed language through a shared Google document. It was legislation being stress-tested in public: line by line, definition by definition, safeguard by safeguard.