There are defined cryptographic notions of transparency, and there are cryptographic primitives that get used to build systems that provide strong transparency guarantees. There are also successfully deployed technical projects like Certificate Transparency (which all major browsers use every time you visit a website), key transparency (deployed in WhatsApp), and software transparency (Sigstore).

​While transparency thus can be a necessary tool for achieving fairness and accountability in complex multi-party systems, it is far from sufficient, both for these more technological systems but especially for more human-oriented systems (e.g., using transparency for governance, as in a DAO).