Yesterday, the European Investment Bank (EIB) issued its third blockchain bond, a £50 million three-year floating rate bond using the HSBC Orion bond tokenization solution. This is the first public bond issue by Orion, which was unveiled last November, and the bond is the first sterling-denominated digital bond.

For the EIB, the bond is its third blockchain issuance and the bank wants to encourage innovation. Previous issuances were made on the public Ethereum blockchain through Societe Generale FORGE and using Goldman Sachs’ digital asset platform.

The latest £50 million bond used Luxembourg law. It involved BNP Paribas, HSBC and RBC Capital Markets as joint lead managers, with the banks also acting as custodians and HSBC as the central account manager.

One of the novel features of the bonus is that it is reflected on a public blockchain for transparency purposes, although the details are anonymized. We assume that transparency is related to the frequency of transactions and the price.

“This is also the first public issuance on our tokenization platform, HSBC Orion, which has opened up opportunities for faster processing and better operational performance in fixed income issuance,” said Asif Sherani, Director of HSBC’s DCM Syndicate EMEA. . Orion uses a private permissioned blockchain. We have requested information about what technology is used.

A division of BNP Paribas also invested in the bond along with Schroders.