South Korea’s Hana Bank has issued a $100 million five-year foreign-currency digital bond through Euroclear’s blockchain-based Digital Financial Market Infrastructure, completing allocation, registration and settlement on the same day. The transaction, completed on September 18 and reported on September 21, reduced the standard settlement cycle from three-to-five business days to same-day T+0 settlement, according to the bank.
Standard Chartered acted as sole lead manager, with the deal executed under Hana Bank’s existing global medium-term note documentation. Crucially, investors do not need a separate trading system: because Euroclear’s D-FMI connects digital issuance to its established international settlement network, holders can continue using their existing Euroclear accounts and trading arrangements. Euroclear first launched its Digital Securities Issuance service on the D-FMI platform in October 2023 with a €100 million digitally native note from the World Bank’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Yonhap described the Hana Bank transaction as the first South Korean digital bond to directly use Euroclear’s proprietary blockchain infrastructure and the first T+0 settlement in the country’s foreign-currency bond market. It was not the country’s first foreign-currency digital bond overall: KB Kookmin Bank completed a $100 million blockchain-based bond sale in Hong Kong in June using HSBC’s Orion platform, cutting settlement from five days to three. Hana’s latest deal follows its August 27 completion of a Korean government bond transaction with U.S. dollar settlement through an international central securities depository, which the bank described as a first for a South Korean commercial bank.
The issuance occurs as South Korea prepares a broader tokenization framework set to take effect in February 2027, covering blockchain-based securities across stocks, bonds and funds. Separately, the country plans to pilot tokenized government bonds using institutional central bank digital currency infrastructure in 2027. Earlier this year, Ripple and Kyobo Life began testing blockchain-based settlement for tokenized government bonds, signaling growing institutional interest in moving fixed-income transactions closer to real-time execution without abandoning conventional market infrastructure.
Euroclear has expanded D-FMI since its 2023 launch, processing digital debt from issuers including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Turkey’s Isbank and Akbank, France’s Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations and Citi. While T+0 settlement can improve capital efficiency, it also requires reliable cash settlement and robust liquidity management; however, Hana Bank’s deal demonstrates that blockchain-based bond issuance can operate inside existing global market plumbing rather than as an isolated experiment.
