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

The Dutch bank used Tokeny’s platform to issue and manage digital green bonds operating on Polygon’s layer-2 Ethereum protocol.

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 euros ($5.3 million).

The green bond was issued as an ERC-3643 token through Tokeny, an infrastructure platform that uses Polygon to allow financial institutions to issue and manage securities and financial instruments

ABN AMRO was able to secure 5 million euros 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 have a positive environmental impact.

ABN AMRO laid out further details of the green bond, which saw DekaBank take ownership of tokens representing its 5 million euro 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 markets, 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 ERC-3643 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 February 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 ($89.5 million) 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 and Credit Agricole CIB. So|bond is intended to be used to issue, trade and settle bonds digitally.