Slovenia has made history by becoming the first country in the Eurozone to issue a sovereign digital bond, utilizing the Canton blockchain platform for on-chain settlement.
The issuance of the Eurozone’s first sovereign digital bond by Slovenia was made possible through an on-chain transaction facilitated by French banking giant BNP Paribas and utilizing the tokenized cash solution provided by Banque de France.
According to a press release from BNP Paribas, the issuance of the digital bond is part of the European Central Bank’s wholesale central bank money settlement experimentation program. The bond was issued using BNP Paribas’s Neobonds platform, which operates on the Canton blockchain.
Frederic Zorzi, the global head of primary markets at BNP Paribas CIB, expressed the bank’s commitment to contributing to the development of wholesale digital settlement solutions within the Eurosystem, aiming to enhance the efficiency and security of bond settlement processes.
Neobonds, the platform used for the issuance of the digital bond, recorded the legal ownership of the bonds digitally, enabling network participants to manage the operational framework for issuance and trading on secondary markets. The bond, with a nominal value of €30 million, offers a 3.65% coupon and matures on Nov. 25.
Canton, launched in 2021 by Digital Asset, is a privacy-enabled interoperable blockchain network designed to provide a decentralized infrastructure for institutional clients. In addition to BNP Paribas, other participants in the network include Deloitte, Cboe Global Markets, Goldman Sachs, and Microsoft.
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