PAFLA and the CADENA Act: Building Trust into the National Budget
How the Philippine Association of Fintech Lawyers supported the drafting of the CADENA Act (Senate Bill No. 1330) — and why legal integrity, citizen accountability, and technology neutrality must anchor an on-chain national budget.
By PAFLA
The Citizen Access and Disclosure of Expenditures for National Accountability (CADENA) Act, filed as Senate Bill No. 1330, sets out an ambitious goal: a national budget that is fully on-chain, transparent, and tamper-proof. It is landmark legislation — and one of the clearest tests yet of how Philippine law should meet emerging digital infrastructure.
The Philippine Association of Fintech Lawyers (PAFLA) has actively supported this effort, providing legal assistance in the drafting of the bill and appearing as a resource person in the Senate. Our involvement reflects PAFLA’s core conviction: technology can strengthen public accountability, but only when it rests on a sound legal foundation.
Why an on-chain budget matters
Public trust depends on the ability to follow the money. When the national budget is recorded on a digital ledger, citizens can trace public funds from their source down to specific projects and disbursements. Records that are transparent and tamper-evident make hidden transactions vastly more difficult to conceal — and make accountability the default rather than the exception.
That is the promise of CADENA: not merely to publish numbers, but to make the entire flow of public spending legible, verifiable, and durable.
PAFLA’s role: legal and technical integrity
Technology alone does not create accountability — the law has to make those digital records reliable, admissible, and trustworthy. In Senate hearings, PAFLA representatives, including Atty. Daniel John Fordan, spoke to the necessity of ensuring the legal reliability, evidentiary integrity, and transparency of blockchain-backed government spending.
The questions PAFLA has helped the Senate work through are foundational:
- How does the law treat an on-chain record as evidence?
- What safeguards guarantee that a “tamper-proof” ledger is, in legal terms, genuinely reliable?
- How do transparency obligations interact with existing rules on disclosure and data?
Tracking the national budget on a digital ledger empowers citizens to trace public funds from the source down to specific projects and disbursements — making hidden transactions virtually impossible.
A technology-neutral approach
While championing the transparent tracking of the national budget, PAFLA — alongside digital advocacy groups such as the Qadena Foundation — has advocated for a technology-neutral approach in the law.
The reason is simple and forward-looking: legislation should secure the outcomes citizens care about — transparency, integrity, and accountability — without locking the government into a single technology forever. Digital infrastructure evolves. A law written around one specific implementation risks obsolescence; a law written around durable principles can endure as the technology beneath it improves.
This is the balance PAFLA works to strike: ambitious in its commitment to transparency, disciplined in its drafting.
Looking ahead
CADENA is more than a single bill. It is a model for how the Philippines can govern the meeting point of finance, law, and technological innovation — the very intersection PAFLA exists to navigate. We will continue to lend our legal expertise to measures that make public institutions more accountable and digital frameworks more trustworthy.
PAFLA provides legal guidance, regulatory compliance, and governance support across the digital finance sector. To learn more about our work or to collaborate, get in touch.