The transaction represents a major development in Euroclear’s ongoing Distributed Financial Market Infrastructure (DFMI) initiative, harnessing the power of R3’s Corda platform to improve the transparency, speed and resilience of the bond issuance process.

The SSA (supranational, sovereign and agency) bond was issued by the World Bank, with Citi - an R3 investor - acting as issuer agent and TD Securities acting as dealer. The issuance took place under UK law and was successfully completed yesterday, Monday 23rd of October at 1pm BST.

The issuance of the digital bond is another example of R3’s Corda being leveraged by regulated institutions around the world to digitise the capital markets and drive innovation forward. The use of Corda’s unique distributed architecture demonstrated the capabilities of the platform to support the issuance and primary distribution part of the lifecycle of a bond under the existing legal framework applicable to an ICSD.

R3 is enabling an open, trusted and enduring digital economy where value is securely exchanged. In addition to Euroclear, Corda is being used by hundreds of institutions to power digital finance solutions across capital markets.

“Through working with our extensive global ecosystem, we have achieved a major milestone in both our DFMI initiative and the evolution of securities trading as a whole.” said Antonio Queiroz, Chief Digital Officer at Euroclear. “As a financial market infrastructure with a track record of providing high quality settlement services to the world’s leading financial institutions, we are excited to continue building on our partnerships to drive digital transformation in the industry and to improve transparency and efficiency across capital markets as a whole.”

“This issuance is not a sandbox or proof of concept project - it is a live market issuance and it demonstrates the role DLT can play in transforming capital markets,” said David E. Rutter, CEO and Founder of R3. “FMI’s such as Euroclear play a critical role in the financial ecosystem. We’re working with them and central banks in areas such as securities settlement to improve how we communicate and exchange value, ultimately to deliver a better, more efficient, open, trusted and enduring digital economy. This is about bringing participants and ecosystems together to modernize mission-critical processes in the capital markets industry. Corda is emerging as the technology of choice because it was designed for regulated markets from the ground-up, ensuring resiliency, governance, scalability and security.”