Not “nothing to hide.” A specific, costly choice to let someone else see what you’d otherwise be free to obscure.
Transparency, in an economic sense, is the reduction of information asymmetry — the gap between what one party knows about a transaction, an asset, or an institution and what the other party can see. That gap is not a neutral feature of markets: research on corporate disclosure finds firms that voluntarily reduce it, through more complete, verifiable reporting, measurably face lower capital constraints and lower financing costs, because the party on the other side of the information gap no longer has to price in the uncertainty of not knowing.
A system built on “radical transparency,” where a shared ledger or open record replaces selective disclosure, is making the same trade at a structural level: it removes the discretion to reveal only favorable information, which is precisely the discretion that makes information asymmetry possible in the first place.
Source: Cheng, B., Ioannou, I. & Serafeim, G., “Corporate Social Responsibility and Access to Finance,” Strategic Management Journal, 2014.