Bataan, the northern peninsula of the Philippine island of Luzon, is leading the way in experimenting with blockchain technology. Dubbed the Community-Based Monitoring System Act (CBMS), it will be the framework for establishing the Philippines’ e-government, backed by nChain.
Bataan is best known for the historical movie classic Bataan from 1943, depicting a pitched battle between Americans and Filipinos against the Japanese invasion. This week, Bataan came into the public spotlight thanks to its novel approach to e-government.
The Community-Based Monitoring System Act (CBMS) was initially signed on May 20, 2020. It works by collecting disaggregated data to further the governance process. When data on a city population is disaggregated into smaller chunks, such as age, income, education, and gender, it brings a nuanced understanding of the information. In turn, such data can facilitate more thoughtful planning, policy implementation, and monitoring of the policy impact.
For instance, with CBMS, the analysis of poverty can be done to plan for the right interventions while monitoring their impact in real-time. Such insights can be applied both on the municipal and federal levels. This way, public spending can be accounted for while prioritizing population groups that need government resource allocation the most.
When investors deal with developing countries like the Philippines, they often consider the level of corruption. This determines the friction level between invested money and money lost on intangibles. To attract investor inflows, Bataan Governor Joet Garcia sees blockchain as a tool to generate asset-backed tokens. Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization is a trend that has been gaining traction in the past few years.
Because blockchain provides an immutable database, it is virtually impossible to fudge accounting. Combined with the CBMS, Bataan is poised to establish real-time feedback between money raised, and spent and its impact on the community. Accordingly, digital governance, backed by tokenized assets, could be tweaked on-the-fly.
The Provincial Government of Bataan (PGB) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with nChain in January. Founded in 2015 and based in London, nChain has been the leader in filing patents on blockchain technology, accounting for nearly 2,800 registered applications. nChain’s main focus has been blockchain research and development to improve blockchain architecture.
nChain is a proponent of the BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision) blockchain, a hard fork of the original Bitcoin blockchain. As such, BSV was designed to be an enterprise-grade blockchain. It is able to handle high transaction volume, with a maximum block size of 4GB, compared to Bitcoin’s 4MB, leading to 50k -100k tps. It also has low latency transactions, leading to near-instant transaction settlements, smart contract support for customized enterprise applications such as CBMS, an optimized proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm that increases transaction throughput and scalability, and low-energy consumption.
The upcoming e-government applications will be built on top of the BSV chain with permissioned access. This will provide the necessary privacy when sharing citizens’ confidential data. The expected rollout of CBMS-integrated blockchain applications should manifest in the coming months.
In terms of going full-cashless via digital economy, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) gave up on retail CBDC in January, following the abysmal CBDC uptake in Nigeria. Nonetheless, the central bank’s primary goal is to increase digital transactions to 50% by the end of 2023.
The Philippine Province of Bataan is leading the way in experimenting with blockchain technology. Dubbed the Community-Based Monitoring System Act (CBMS), it will be the framework for establishing the Philippines’ e-government, backed by nChain. This novel approach to e-government works by collecting disaggregated data to further the governance process. This way, public spending can be accounted for while prioritizing population groups that need government resource allocation the most.
To attract investor inflows, Bataan Governor Joet Garcia sees blockchain as a tool to generate asset-backed tokens. Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization is a trend that has been gaining traction in the past few years. Because blockchain provides an immutable database, it is virtually impossible to fudge accounting. Combined with the CBMS, Bataan is poised to establish real-time feedback between money raised, and spent and its impact on the community.
The Provincial Government of Bataan (PGB) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with nChain in January. nChain is a proponent of the BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision) blockchain, a hard fork of the original Bitcoin blockchain. As such, BSV was designed to be an enterprise-grade blockchain. It is able to handle high transaction volume, with a maximum block size of 4GB, compared to Bitcoin’s 4MB, leading to 50k -100k tps. It also has low latency transactions, leading to near-instant transaction settlements, smart contract support for customized enterprise applications such as CBMS, an optimized proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm that increases transaction throughput and scalability, and low-energy consumption.
The upcoming e-government applications will be built on top of the BSV chain with permissioned access. This will provide the necessary privacy when sharing citizens’ confidential data. The expected rollout of CBMS-integrated blockchain applications should manifest in the coming months.
In terms of going full-cashless via digital economy, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) gave up on retail CBDC in January, following the abysmal CBDC uptake in Nigeria. Nonetheless, the central bank’s primary goal is to increase digital transactions to 50% by the end of 2023.
The Philippine Province of Bataan is leading the way in experimenting with blockchain technology and is hoping it will lead to improved governance, greater transparency, and better service delivery for its citizens. By utilizing the CBMS and the BSV blockchain, Bataan is hoping to create a more efficient, secure, and cost-effective system for delivering public services. The expected rollout of CBMS-integrated blockchain applications should manifest in the coming months and could be a great example for other countries to follow.
