Primary issuance onchain

Why it matters

Every security begins as a record. A syndicate agrees terms, a paying agent instructs a depository, the depository credits participant accounts, and the investor's custodian credits the investor. Each step copies the step before it, and most of what post-trade infrastructure costs is the work of keeping the copies in agreement. Issuing onchain collapses them into one: the entry that constitutes the security and the entry that evidences the holding are the same entry.

That is the operational claim. The measurable claim is narrower. Issuers that have gone first are overwhelmingly highly rated public-sector and supranational borrowers, and the question they are answering is not whether a chain can hold a bond but whether investors will pay more for one held that way.

How it works

Three structures dominate, and they differ in where the security legally lives.

The first keeps the depository. Clearstream's D7 platform issues an instrument that is DLT-native but still settles inside a system authorised under the Central Securities Depositories Regulation. On 29 June 2026 the European Investment Bank placed €77.5m of commercial paper with a ten business day tenor on D7, with Citi as sole dealer and as issuing and paying agent, and BIL, DekaBank, DZ BANK, Eurex Clearing, Union Investment and Volksbank Mittlerer Schwarzwald among the buyers. DekaBank and Eurex Clearing then mobilised the paper through Clearstream's triparty service and the Eurosystem Collateral Management System to obtain Bundesbank financing against it.

The second removes the depository entirely, which only works where statute allows it. Germany's Electronic Securities Act creates a category of crypto security whose register is kept by a licensed registrar rather than a central depository; Cashlink Technologies holds such a licence under Section 16 of that Act. On 25 March 2026 DZ BANK issued a crypto security on Polygon with KfW as investor, Cashlink as registrar, WM Datenservice assigning the ISIN automatically and a Bundesbank interface moving central bank money against the ledger entry. DZ BANK and KfW put the elapsed time at roughly one hour against about five days conventionally.

The third has a market infrastructure run the issuance itself. The Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation raised about HK$12bn equivalent on 11 June 2026 across three tranches, HK$6bn at two years, HK$2.5bn at five and CNH 3bn at three, on the distributed ledger platform operated by the Central Moneymarkets Unit and linked to Euroclear and Clearstream. Settlement ran three business days from pricing rather than five, and the peak order book reached around HK$24bn from more than 100 accounts.

Funds work differently again, because a fund share is created continuously. Apollo's Diversified Credit Securitize Fund, launched on 30 January 2025 across six networks, takes subscriptions and pays redemptions at a daily net asset value through Securitize Markets. Primary issuance here is a standing facility, not an event.

Economic mechanism

The ECB's Macroprudential Bulletin of April 2026 is the first study to price the question properly. Comparing 41 tokenised bonds against 546 conventional bonds from the same issuers, it found the tokenised deals came with a yield spread at issuance 0.14 percentage points lower on average, a reduction of about 40% and significant at the 5% level. Underwriting fees went the other way: 0.04 percentage points higher on average, with no statistical significance.

Follow the money and the mechanism is not disintermediation. The dealer is still paid, and paid slightly more. What the issuer captures is a demand effect: a scarce, novel instrument bought by a set of investors who want the exposure for reasons of their own, including a mandate to build capability. The saving is a premium paid by buyers, not a cost taken out of the chain, which means it is the kind of saving that compresses as supply grows.

The second mechanism is collateral eligibility, and it is the more durable one. On 27 January 2026 the ECB decided that marketable assets issued in central securities depositories using distributed ledger services would be eligible Eurosystem collateral from 30 March 2026, provided they meet the existing criteria, settle in a CSDR-compliant system and are reachable through TARGET2-Securities. That converts a format question into a balance sheet question. An instrument a bank can pledge at the central bank is one it can hold without a liquidity penalty, and the EIB paper was mobilised for Bundesbank financing within weeks of the rule taking effect. No private platform can manufacture that; only the central bank can.

Where it breaks is repetition. The ECB's dataset covers 183 tokenised bonds issued between August 2018 and November 2025, with 88% of them in the last three years, two-thirds of issuers domiciled in Germany, and 44% of issuers having issued in both formats. Most issuers have done one deal. A pricing advantage measured on first-time trades by AAA borrowers is not yet a cost curve.

Participants

Sovereign, supranational and agency borrowers supply almost all the paper, because they can absorb the legal cost of a first deal and their credit is not in question. Dealers and paying agents (Citi, HSBC and the German cooperative and Landesbank groups) still run the book. Registrars such as Cashlink and depositories such as Clearstream and SIX Digital Exchange hold the record. Numbering agencies, trustees and rating agencies are each a potential single point of refusal. On the fund side the platform is the agent: Securitize combines transfer agency, broker-dealer and administration inside one group, which is why a tokenised feeder can be stood up faster than a tokenised bond.

Examples

The HKMC issue of 11 June 2026 is notable less for its size than for compressing settlement inside an existing central bank operated platform rather than a new one.

The EIB commercial paper of 29 June 2026 matters because of what happened after issuance: it was pledged for central bank financing, which is the test a treasurer cares about.

The DZ BANK issue of 25 March 2026 shows both the promise and the limit. The lifecycle ran end to end on a public chain with no depository, and it was a bilateral trade between two institutions that wanted the exercise.

Risks and limitations

Selection bias is the honest reading of the pricing result. The issuers who tokenise are the ones least likely to be paying a risk premium of any kind, and the comparison set is their own conventional curve, so a novelty bid and a scarcity bid are hard to separate from an efficiency gain. The ECB authors say as much about the retail sub-sample, where the sign reverses on a handful of observations.

Practitioners disagree about where the saving is supposed to come from. Platform operators argue the gain is in lifecycle servicing (coupon calculation, corporate actions, register reconciliation) and will show up over a bond's life rather than at pricing. The ECB result is that the fee paid at issuance did not fall, which is the only part of the claim that has been measured. Both can be true, and neither has been demonstrated at scale.

Fragmentation is the structural risk. Europe alone has Euroclear's D-FMI, Clearstream's D7 and a permissioned pan-European ledger operated cooperatively by banks, each with its own participant set. An issuer choosing one is choosing an investor base.

Finally, the registrar model depends on a statute that mostly does not exist. Germany has one. Most jurisdictions do not, which is why so much of the issuance is German and why the ECB's collateral decision was framed around depositories rather than registers.

Key metrics

Outstanding stock is the figure everyone quotes and the least informative. The ECB put global tokenised assets at roughly €38bn in February 2026 against €7.4bn at the start of 2024, in a global financial system it sizes at €241tn. Gross issuance per quarter, the count of repeat issuers, the number of investors per deal and the proportion of issues eligible as central bank collateral all say more about whether primary markets are forming. The series carried here measure outstanding tokenised value by asset class, which is the cumulative residue of issuance rather than issuance itself.

Related research

The ECB Macroprudential Bulletin of April 2026 carries the two articles that define the evidence base: one pricing tokenised bonds against conventional ones from the same issuers, the other setting out the Eurosystem's Pontes and Appia work and the platform fragmentation it addresses. ICMA's tracker of new financial technology applications in bond markets is the closest thing to a register of individual deals, with amounts and platforms attached.

The data on this site

The series below are the ones that bear directly on this concept. Each carries its own source, cadence and coverage.