In this episode, PGMN’s first tech anchor, Ann Cuisia, delivers a decisive and unfiltered breakdown of how the headline-grabbing “Blockchain the Budget” proposal—once praised, misunderstood, and widely misinterpreted—was dismantled and rebuilt into the CADENA Act. She exposes why anchoring a national reform on a single technology was dangerous, how it would have weakened transparency instead of strengthening it, and how a coalition of experts, civic groups, and academics intervened to save the bill from becoming a costly, vendor-driven trap.
Ann takes viewers inside the pivotal moments that reshaped the reform: the rejection of hype-heavy, tool-based language; the shift toward tamper-resistant, verifiable public data; the correction from “uploading” to “publishing”; and the non-negotiable need for data sovereignty to protect the nation’s fiscal integrity. She shows how collaboration, humility, and the purity of intention behind the reform allowed it to evolve into a framework built to outlive any platform, provider, or political cycle.
Her analysis brings the reform back to where it always should have been: grounded in principles, driven by outcomes, and built to serve the public. This episode offers a clear view of a national reform that was nearly misunderstood—and how it was ultimately set right.