Abstract

Despite extensive investment in digital government and open data, public spending and broader economic activity remain largely opaque in real time. Transparency is typically delivered through delayed reports, fragmented portals, or reactive access mechanisms, leaving citizens, businesses, and policymakers without a shared and timely view of how money moves through the economy. This article proposes Transparent Money, a conceptual socio-technical architecture that reframes fiscal and economic transparency as an infrastructural property of monetary systems rather than a downstream reporting obligation.
The approach assigns a unique identifier to each digital unit of money and records its movement on a public, permissioned ledger. This enables continuous visibility of public spending and aggregate economic activity while preventing the identification of individuals or firms. Privacy is embedded by design through schema-level anonymity constraints, denomination splitting, temporal and spatial coarsening, and shared reissuance mechanisms that prevent inference-based reconstruction of private behaviour while preserving the statistical coherence of economic data. A dual-database model separates public traceability from private ownership information held by financial institutions. The system operates as an informational layer rather than a payment mechanism, distinguishing it from digital currency proposals and allowing reversibility without disrupting economic activity.
The article contributes to debates on governance and technology in society by demonstrating that real-time fiscal transparency, economy-wide economic insight, and individual privacy are not structurally incompatible. Analysed as a governance technology, Transparent Money illustrates how digital infrastructures can redistribute informational power, reduce asymmetries between institutions and society, and support more informed economic, business, and policy decision-making.