State-owned German bank KfW has issued a €4 billion ($4.28bn) digital bond with a value date of 2 July. The benchmark bond is its second digital bond issuance via Clearstream using Deutsche Börse’s D7 digital securities platform. It’s a three year bond with a coupon of 2.75%.
“We are delighted to have successfully completed a second digital transaction, with a focus on further automating data generation and speeding up the issuance process, thus improving scalability,” said Tim Armbruster, Treasurer at KfW. “We thank Deutsche Börse for the constructive cooperation over the past months. It is important to us to provide key insights from the issuer’s perspective to contribute to the further digitisation of capital markets.”
On the face of it, this is easily the largest digital bond, with the next biggest being Hong Kong’s $756 million green bond in February. However, some might argue that they are not the same because the ledger used for the KfW bond is entirely centralized, even though it is underpinned by Digital Asset’s smart contract DAML. DAML2 has the Canton DLT built in.
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