Tokenization

Sovereign tokenisation is real, it has been done, and it does far less than it is sold as doing. This page is what has actually settled — dated and sourced — what the format does not fix, and only then the thing Perfect Nations is proposing.

Cases recorded

Each one

sourced

Our own proposal

a concept

What has actually settled

Seven entries, in order. Six went to market or to a working prototype; one did not, and is here for that reason.

2018

World Bank “bond-i”

World Bank · Commonwealth Bank of Australia · A$110m

The first bond created, allocated, transferred and managed through its life using distributed ledger technology. A landmark because it proved the full lifecycle could run on a ledger, not because it changed the economics of the debt.

World Bank →

2021

EIB digital bond

European Investment Bank · Goldman Sachs, Santander, Société Générale · €100m

A two-year note issued and settled on a public blockchain, with the syndicate registering the securities on-chain. The first digital bond from a supranational issuer of this size.

EIB →

Feb 2023

Hong Kong’s inaugural tokenised green bond

HKSAR Government · HKMA · HK$800m

The first tokenised green bond issued by a government. Proof that a sovereign could take the format to market under its own name rather than through a pilot.

HKMA →

Nov 2023

Philippines tokenised Treasury bonds

Bureau of the Treasury, Republic of the Philippines · ₱15bn

One-year bonds at 6.50%, sold to institutional investors on a dual registry — the Treasury’s own DLT registry alongside the conventional one. Targeted at ₱10bn and awarded at ₱15bn on demand. The first tokenised sovereign issuance in South-East Asia.

Global Government Finance →

Feb 2024

Hong Kong’s multi-currency digital green bond

HKSAR Government · CMU · HSBC Orion · HK$6bn equivalent

Four currencies in one digitally native issue — HK$2bn, RMB1.5bn, US$200m and €80m — sold without first issuing conventionally and converting. The clearest demonstration to date that the format works at sovereign scale.

HKSAR Government →

Apr 2025

Project Promissa

BIS Innovation Hub · World Bank · Swiss National Bank · Proof of concept

Tokenising the promissory notes that member countries use to pledge multi-year contributions to multilateral development banks — today still paper. Seven countries took part and the IMF observed. The report found a platform technically feasible, and said plainly that more work would be needed to make it operational.

BIS →

2021–

El Salvador’s “Volcano” bond

Government of El Salvador · US$1bn announced

Announced in 2021 as a bitcoin-backed sovereign bond, postponed in 2022 citing market conditions, and given domestic regulatory approval in December 2023. On the latest public reporting it has not been issued at the announced scale. It is on this page deliberately: the gap between an announcement and a settled trade is where most of this subject lives.

CoinDesk →

What tokenisation does not fix

Anyone selling this to a finance ministry should be made to say these five things first. They are the reason the format has spread among issuers who were never short of buyers, and barely at all among those who are.

It does not change who will lend to you.Tokenisation changes the record and the settlement, not the credit. A country that cannot place a conventional bond does not become placeable by issuing the same risk on a ledger. Every issuance above was done by an issuer who could already borrow.

It does not create a buyer.Most tokenised sovereign issues so far have been bought by the same institutions that buy the conventional paper, often into the same portfolios. Secondary trading has generally been thin. The promised retail market is still largely promised.

The legal claim is the hard part, not the technology.What a holder actually owns, in which jurisdiction, and what happens in a default or a restructuring, is settled by law and by the documentation — not by the ledger. Hong Kong and the Philippines both ran a conventional registry alongside the digital one for exactly this reason.

The saving is real but modest.Faster settlement, fewer intermediaries, less reconciliation. Worth having. Not the difference between financing a water system and not financing it.

Verification is the unsolved problem for anything outcome-linked.A token representing delivery of a standard is only as good as the measurement behind it. Who counts the households connected, how often, and who is liable if the count is wrong — none of that is a blockchain question, and all of it has to be answered first.

The Standard Token

Everything above prices a nation’s promise to repay. The proposal here is to price something else: a nation’s verified delivery of a standard — a household connected to clean water, a child in a class of forty, a home that meets the floor.

A Standard Token would represent one verified unit of that delivery, against one of the eight standards, measured the way that page defines it. The instrument it settles against would pay on the measurement, not on the activity — which is the same logic as an outcome bond, with the outcome defined by a published floor rather than negotiated deal by deal.

It does not exist. There is no token, no issuance, no pilot and no counterparty. The verification problem in the fifth limit above is unsolved and would have to be solved first. It is published here as a design under development, so that it can be argued with.

Concept stage. Standard Tokens are a design concept, not a live financial product. Nothing on this page is an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security or financial instrument, and nothing here is investment or legal advice.

Tokenization

What has actually settled