According to Cointelegraph, Dutch bank ABN Amro has successfully raised €5 million through a digital green bond offering that utilized Polygon's layer 2 Ethereum scaling technology. The green bond was issued as an ERC3643 token via Tokeny, an infrastructure platform that leverages Polygon to enable financial institutions to issue and manage securities and financial instruments. The funding will be used by real estate investor Vesteda to refinance green assets as part of the company's green finance framework.
DekaBank took ownership of tokens representing its €5 million investment after payment was made. ABN Amro used Fireblocks to manage private keys to the digital bond. The bank has previously explored digital bond issuance, including purchasing and reselling a digital bond from the European Investment Bank (EIB). ABN Amro's head of debt capital markets, Olivier Aartsen, stated that the bank aims to support multiple digital bond offerings in the future.
Martijn Siebrand, ABN Amro's digital asset lead, noted that using the ERC3643 standard allowed the bank to embed compliance rules into digital bonds. Mainstream financial institutions are increasingly adopting blockchain technology to issue and manage digital bond offerings for various use cases. Siemens, for example, launched a $64 million digital bond in February 2023 that attracted direct investment from DekaBank, DZ Bank, and Union Investment. Additionally, the European Investment Bank issued a unique blockchain-based digital bond in June 2023, powered by environmentally-incentivized node infrastructure, offering a 3.638% fixed rate over two years to institutional investors.
