Today AXA Investment Managers (AXA IM) said it purchased a €5 million tokenized green bond issued by Societe Generale using the CoinVertible for settlement. That’s a stablecoin issued by Societe Generale FORGE. The transaction on the public Ethereum blockchain is part of a new joint experiment. In July AXA IM was a judge in SocGen Forge’s tokenization hackathon.
CoinVertible isn’t designed as an average stablecoin, but instead for institutional usage. As in this case, there’s a need for trusted on-chain settlement assets.
“The aim of this initiative, carried out in collaboration with Societe Generale – FORGE, was to enable us to experiment the use of a stablecoin as a settlement asset to purchase a digital bond,” said Laurence Arnold, Head of Innovation and Strategic Initiatives. “Our ultimate objective is to optimise our existing processes by adopting the most advanced technologies, so we can offer the best possible services to our clients.”
SocGen’s first digital green bond
Meanwhile, the digital bond reports the carbon footprint of the security token issuance infrastructure on chain. Societe Generale issued a €10 million bond, with AXA IM taking half and Generali Investments the balance. It’s a three year, senior preferred unsecured bond.
Despite the stablecoin’s launch in April, this is the first real use of it. The original stablecoin had zero transactions and was burned in October and updated to a new contract to support instant settlement. AXA IM’s purchase of the stablecoin and transfer in exchange for the bond took place on Friday. SocGen Forge holds €10 million of the stablecoin, with another €500,000 issued to an unknown wallet last week.
Since Friday there have also been some small transactions involving the Bitstamp exchange.
AXA IM previously participated in the European Investment Bank Ethereum bond that was issued on Ethereum via SocGen FORGE’s infrastructure. In March the French regulator AMF granted AXA IM its digital asset license. SocGen FORGE received its first license in September 2022 and an expanded version this July.
Update: added details re bond amount and Generali
