Bank of China Announces Issuance of $28 Million Worth of Digital Structured Notes Minted on Ethereum.

On Monday, June 12, The Bank of China’s investment bank Subsidiary BOCI announced the Bank’s decision to issue 200 million Chinese yuan ($28 million) worth of digitally structured notes that would be minted on the Ethereum blockchain. This move by the Bank made BOCI the first Chinese financial institution to issue tokenized securities in Hong Kong. 

The CEO of BOCI, Ying Wang, also commented that they got help from the Investment banking company UBS in originating the product for placement to the client in the Asia-pacific region. 

In addition, the BOCI is working together with UBS to drive the simplification of digital asset markets and products for customers in the Asian Pacific region through the development of blockchain-based digital products that have been designed specifically for customers in the Asian Pacific region. 

Concurrent with this development between these two banks, UBS has also been working on expanding its tokenization across structured products, fixed incomes, and repo financing. 

UBS also issued a $50 million tokenized fixed-rate note in late 2022, under Swiss and English law, digitalizing it on a permissioned blockchain. 

In a previous report, Cointelegraph made a report that Hong Kong opened access to crypto exchanges for retail users on June 1, and after roughly two weeks, under the financial services and the treasury for the government of Hong Kong, Joseph Chan Ho-lim stated that the particular administrative region has an active participation in the blockchain industry, and has the aim to establish a framework for stablecoin regulation within the next few months in the year. 

In February, Hong Kong issued an HK$800 million green bond tokenized on Goldman Sachs’ tokenization protocol, GS DAP, with reports of an annual yield of 4.05%. In December 2022, Hong Kong announced two exchange-traded funds for cryptocurrency futures and was able to raise $70 million before its launch.

Hong Kong has repeatedly been mentioned in recent crypto-related news in the Asian region. In May, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission announced its intent to begin allowing licensed virtual asset trading platforms to serve retail investors. The news, however, came with a catch, they had to be willing to comply with the Securities and Futures Commission’s proposed guidelines. 

The guidelines are set to become effective this month, the SFC has, however, not approved any virtual asset trading platforms to provide any services to retail investors, and according to information from the Securities and Futures Commission, they have received 152 written submissions from within the virtual assets industry within the SFC’s consultation period. 

Conclusion

These regions are increasingly becoming crypto and digital assets friendly and will likely see an influx of users and customers in the coming future.