South Korea-based Hana Bank has reportedly issued a USD 100 million digital bond using Euroclear's blockchain-based infrastructure.
The five-year foreign-currency bond was issued through Euroclear's Digital Financial Market Infrastructure, according to a report published by Yonhap News Agency. Yonhap described the transaction as the first digital bond issuance in South Korea to directly use Euroclear's blockchain infrastructure. Neither party has publicly confirmed the details.
Issuance and settlement on a distributed ledger
According to the report, the bond's issuance, registration, and settlement were all processed on a distributed ledger network. This places several stages of the bond's lifecycle on a single ledger-based system instead of limiting the technology to one step.
The most concrete operational change reported relates to timing. Using distributed ledger technology for bond allocation and payment settlement reportedly reduced a process that typically takes three to five business days to the same day.
Connection to existing market infrastructure
Yonhap also reported that the bond connects to Euroclear's existing global settlement network. As a result, investors can trade the instrument through their existing accounts and trading systems.
This arrangement addresses a practical consideration in digital bond issuance: whether investors need to adopt separate systems to hold and trade digitally issued instruments. In this case, the ledger-based issuance and settlement process reportedly sits alongside the account and trading arrangements investors already use. Therefore, investor access does not depend on onboarding to new infrastructure.
Euroclear's earlier digital bond activity
The Hana Bank transaction follows Euroclear's launch of its Digital Securities Issuance service in October 2023. At launch, Euroclear settled a digital bond worth USD 106 million at the time, issued by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the World Bank's lending arm. The three-year bond raised funds for sustainable development and was listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange.
The two issuances are similar in size, but the reported Hana Bank bond has a five-year tenor compared with three years for the 2023 IBRD bond. It also extends the use of Euroclear's digital issuance infrastructure from the World Bank's lending arm to a bank in South Korea issuing in a foreign currency. This makes it a reference point for how issuers in the country may approach ledger-based bond issuance through established market infrastructure.
