Philippines Turns to Blockchain After Mass Protests Over Corruption
The Philippines has launched a blockchain-based transparency system for its Department of Public Works and Highways after mass protests over alleged corruption in flood-control projects worth billions.
Integrity Chain, developed by BayaniChain Ventures, was unveiled on Wednesday as a platform to record DPWH contracts and project milestones on a tamper-proof ledger.
The goal is to turn “government records into digital public assets that are immutable, verifiable, and openly validated,” BayaniChain CEO and co-founder Paul Soliman told Decrypt.
Once expanded from the DPWH to other agencies, the initiative could later help “protect the entire annual budget of the Philippines,” estimated at roughly $98 billion, he said.
The project is part of a broader effort “to reshape accountability across every department and every peso spent,” making accountability “permanent, measurable, and unavoidable,” Soliman said.
“Public trust will be rebuilt not on promises, but on cryptography, open validation, and a system where citizens themselves can verify outcomes,” he added.
The rollout comes in the wake of mass protests drawing an estimated 130,000 people on September 21, which marked the 53rd anniversary of martial law declared by former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr., father of the current president. The declaration is remembered for widespread human rights abuses, censorship, and corruption.
Protests demanded accountability after revelations of overpriced contracts, substandard construction, and ghost projects in the country’s flood-control program under the DPWH’s oversight.
Over $33 billion was allocated to flood-control projects across 15 years, according to the Australian Institute of International Affairs.
On-chain civic accountability
Similar to an earlier implementation at the Department of Budget and Management, Integrity Chain ingests data directly from DPWH systems, minting each contract, budget release, and project milestone as a digital public asset.
Prismo, the orchestration layer, manages data handling, encryption, and validation. The platform runs on Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake network, an Ethereum-compatible scaling solution that serves as its consensus and transparency layer.
The records are then cryptographically time-stamped and anchored on-chain before reaching independent validators, so that “any attempt to withhold or manipulate information becomes visible rather than hidden,” Gelo Wong, chief growth officer and co-founder at BayaniChain, told Decrypt.
Validators include independent civic organizations, non-governmental organizations, universities, and media groups, among other sectors. These validators would review and attest to the entries, with their own actions logged as public records to maintain accountability.
Keys for validators are “hardware-secured, rotated periodically, and assigned to reviews through randomization,” with each validator action “recorded on-chain as its own public asset, ensuring that misconduct or bias is transparently logged,” Wong explained.
Asked about safeguards, Wong pointed to the framework’s one-organization-one-vote model, which prevents any sector from dominating the process. More than 40 non-governmental organizations participated at launch, providing a “wide and diversified base of civic accountability,” he added.