ABN Amro issues €5M digital green bond through Polygon-powered Tokeny

Dutch bank ABN Amro has carried out a digital green bond offering that made use of Polygon’s layer 2 Ethereum scaling technology to raise €5 million.

The green bond was issued as a ERC3643 token through Tokeny, an infrastructure platform that uses Polygon to allow financial institutions issue and manage securities and financial instruments.

ABN AMRO was able to secure €5 million in funding for real estate investor Vesteda. According to the bank, Vesteda intends to use the funding to refinance “green assets” as part of the company’s green finance framework.

Green bonds are a means to raise funds that are used to invest in projects or companies that are sustainable and affect positive environmental impact.

ABN AMRO laid out further details of the green bond, which saw DekaBank take ownership of tokens representing it’s € 5 million investment after payment was made. The bank makes use of Fireblocks to manage private keys to the digital bond.

ABN AMRO has previously explored digital bonds issuance, including purchasing and reselling a digital bond from the European Investment Bank (EIB).

The bank’s head of debt capital markers Olivier Aartsen said ABN AMRO aims to support multiple digital bond offerings in the future.

ABN Amro’s digital asset lead Martijn Siebrand added that using the ERC3643 standard allowed the bank to embed compliance rules into digital bonds.

“They can even seamlessly and compliantly interact with other applications on the public network thanks to native interoperability.”

Mainstream financial institutions are increasingly making use of blockchain technology to issue and manage digital bond offerings for a number of different use cases.

Siemens grabbed headlines in Feb. 2023 as it launched a $64 million digital bond that drew direct investment from DekaBank, DZ Bank, and Union Investment.

Meanwhile the European Investment Bank issued a unique blockchain-based digital bond in June 2023 powered by environmentally-incentivized node infrastructure. The 1 billion Swedish krona bond is set to offer a 3.638% fixed rate over two years to institutional investors.

The platform underpinning the EIB’s digital bond was developed in a joint project including Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) and Credit Agricole CIB. So|bon is intended to be used to issue, trade and settle bonds digitally.