Philippines to sell $179M in tokenized treasury bonds for the first time

The Philippines Bureau of the Treasury announced it would offer 10 billion pesos ($179 million) of one-year tokenized treasury bonds for the first time after canceling the traditional auction scheduled for Nov. 20.

The Bureau of the Treasury will offer these tokenized bonds to institutional buyers at minimum denominations of 10 million pesos with increments of 1 million pesos. The bonds will be valid for one year and due in November 2024. The final interest rate will be disclosed on the issuance date, according to a report by Bloomberg.

The bonds will be issued by the state-owned Development Bank of the Philippines and the Land Bank of the Philippines.

When asked whether the government is exploring continuous use of tokenized real-world assets and bonds, Deputy Treasurer Erwin Sta said that they will “continue to study the technology and test how far we can take it,”

The move by the Philippines to issue tokenized bonds over traditional ones comes amid a growing interest of Asian governments in the tokenized bond market. Earlier in February this year, Hong Kong issued $100 million in tokenized green bonds under its Green Bond Programme. The government used Goldman Sachs’ tokenization protocol to tokenize these bonds with one-year validity.

Another Asian country, Singapore, recently launched a series of pilots on tokenizing real-world assets in partnership with JPMorgan, DBS Bank, BNY Mellon and investment firm Apollo. United Arab Emirates has also teamed up with HSBC banks to carry out tokenization of bonds.

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Apart from the growing popularity of blockchain-based real-world asset tokenization in Asia, the Tel Aviv stock exchange carried out a proof-of-concept for tokenizing fiat and government bonds.

The tokenization of real-world assets using blockchain technology has gained popularity among governments after years of various proofs-of-concept. The trend has also gained momentum fuelled by the interest of financial giants like JP Morgan, HSBC and a few others.