ABN AMRO, headquartered in Amsterdam, reportedly became the first bank in Europe to register a digital bond on the public blockchain, using Fireblocks.
The digital bond was issued to a select group of investors “to raise funds on behalf of APOC, an ABN AMRO commercial client in the aerospace industry.”
ABN AMRO’s bond issuance “sets an innovative precedent in bringing more real-world use cases of blockchain technology to traditional financial markets.” This initiative “showcases the potential of new financing streams for commercial companies across all industries.”
This updated digital solution for providing their medium-sized and larger commercial clients with leveraged financing “fills a gap between traditional bonds and crowdfunding.” Thanks to the blockchain, “it’s highly efficient and very client-friendly,” according to Edwin van Bommel, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer.
It’s not just banks who have stepped up their adoption of blockchain technology – in October 2022, the Israel Ministry of Finance and Tel Aviv Stock Exchange “issued a first-of-its-kind digital bond with Fireblocks.”
ABN AMRO collaborated with Fireblocks and Bitbond on “the issuance of APOC’s tokenized bond offering.”
The smart contract was “created on the Stellar blockchain, using Bitbond’s technology.”
ABN AMRO then utilized Fireblocks’ end-to-end tokenization platform “to securely mint/burn, and custody the token, as well as to simplify digital asset treasury management processes.”
Ownership of the bonds was “recorded on the blockchain in the form of tokens that investors acquired after they had paid for the bond.”
As the issuer and Sole Arranger of its first digital bond, ABN AMRO is “setting a new bar for how traditional banks can better serve commercial clients using blockchain technology.”
Fireblocks is proud “to support ABN AMRO with secure, highly-scalable foundational technology for the issuance of digital bonds,” noted Michael Shaulov, CEO and co-Founder.
Fireblocks, an “easy-to-use” platform to create innovative products on the blockchain and manage day-to-day crypto operations, recently announced that it has become the first company to have its digital asset infrastructure system “certified by the CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium (C4) as a CryptoCurrency Security Standard (CCSS) Level 3 Qualified Service Provider (QSP).”
Crafted and peer-reviewed by a team of cryptocurrency and cybersecurity veterans including Andreas M. Antonopopulous, Michael Perklin, Petri Basson, Jameson Lopp and S. Dirk Anderson, CryptoCurrency Security Standard (CCSS) is “an industry-first set of requirements for all information systems that make use of cryptocurrencies, including exchanges, web applications, and cryptocurrency storage solutions.”
By standardizing the techniques and methodologies used by systems around the globe, CCSS ensures “a balance between security and usability so that end-users can easily make educated decisions about which companies and products they wish to align.’