Slovenia Becomes First European Union Nation to Issue Sovereign Digital Bond

Slovenia became the first European Union member to issue a sovereign digital bond with a 30 million-euro ($32.5 million) note that settled on-chain through the Bank of France's tokenized cash system as part of the European Central Bank's money settlement experimentation program.

The four-month notes mature Nov. 25 and carry a coupon of 3.65%. Settlement took place in wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) on Thursday, the Slovenian government said. A wholesale CBDC is a digital token designed for use by financial institutions rather than consumers.

The ECB completed its first test of the settlement of a wholesale CBDC in May and said it would conduct more trials and experiments over the following months. The first experiment, carried out by Austria's central bank, looked at the tokenization and simulated delivery-versus-payment settlement of government bonds in a secondary market transaction against central bank money, the ECB said at the time.

"These initial transactions and experiments with wholesale tokenized central bank money represent an important steppingstone to greater transparency and efficiency of financial markets with wider technology adoption," the Slovenian government said. "While hardly material in financial markets at the moment in terms of value issued and/or traded, we expect the importance of the distributed ledger technology to grow significantly in the following years."

BNP Paribas acted as global coordinator and sole bookrunner, as well as the distributed ledger technology platform operator of Neobonds, its private tokenization platform built with Digital Asset's Daml and leveraging Canton blockchain.

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