In August 2018, the World Bank issued the world's first blockchain bond. The bond — called bond-i, for Blockchain Offered New Debt Instrument — raised A$110 million (approximately US$80 million at the time) from investors including several major Australian financial institutions. The platform was built by Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The bond ran on a private Ethereum network. It was the first bond by any issuer — government, supranational, or corporate — to be created, allocated, transferred, and managed throughout its life using blockchain technology.
This was six years before BlackRock launched BUIDL. Three years before Franklin Templeton launched BENJI. Five years before Quincy, Massachusetts issued the first blockchain municipal bond. Bond-i was not a pilot. It was not a proof of concept. It was a live A$110 million bond that settled and paid interest on blockchain infrastructure.
What Made It Different
The World Bank — formally the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) — is a supranational institution, not a commercial bank or fund. It has the highest possible credit rating (Aaa from Moody's, AAA from S&P and Fitch). Its bonds are held by central banks, sovereign wealth funds, and the most conservative institutional investors in the world. The decision to issue bond-i was not a crypto experiment — it was a deliberate institutional bet on blockchain infrastructure from an organization whose mandate includes building and testing financial infrastructure for development purposes.
Bond-i used a private Ethereum network built by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), which acted as sole arranger. Investors — including First State Super (now Aware Super), NSW Treasury Corporation, Northern Trust, QBE Insurance, RABOBANK, and Treasury Corporation of Victoria — accessed the platform through CBA's infrastructure. Every aspect of the bond's lifecycle was managed on the platform: issuance, allocation, management, transfer, and the record of ownership.
How It Performed
Bond-i was a two-year bond, maturing August 2020. It priced at a coupon of 2.251%, consistent with the World Bank's conventional bond pricing at the time — the blockchain infrastructure added no premium to the World Bank's borrowing cost. Interest payments were made on schedule. At maturity, the bond was redeemed at par.
The full lifecycle — issuance, coupon payments, maturity, redemption — was recorded on the blockchain. No errors. No settlement failures. No regulatory intervention. The bond performed identically to a conventional World Bank bond in every economic respect. The difference was entirely in the infrastructure used to issue and manage it.
In May 2019, the World Bank opened the bond-i platform to secondary market trading, allowing investors to transfer their holdings on-chain. The World Bank also brought additional investors onto the platform and expanded access to the bond register. CBA developed tools that let bond-i investors view their holdings alongside their other World Bank bonds in a unified register — the first integration of blockchain bond records with conventional investment management systems.
What Bond-i Proved
In 2018, the standard objection to blockchain bonds was that the technology was not ready for institutional-grade issuance. Bond-i answered that objection with A$110 million in actual institutional capital from actual institutional investors under actual World Bank governance. The technology was ready enough for the World Bank to use it in a live, rated, publicly disclosed bond issuance — and for the most conservative institutional investors in Australia to buy it.
It also proved something about the economics. The World Bank did not pay a higher coupon because the bond was issued on blockchain. The technology added capability — transparency, lifecycle management, potential for secondary market trading — without adding cost to the World Bank's borrowing. That economic neutrality is the foundation argument for all subsequent institutional tokenization: blockchain can improve efficiency without increasing cost to issuers.
Amir Kerure and Raquelle Zuzarte, co-heads of the World Bank's capital markets infrastructure team, described the rationale: the World Bank's mandate includes exploring technology that could improve development finance. Bond-i was not a one-off experiment — it was a proof of concept intended to inform the broader adoption of blockchain in development finance and capital markets.
What Came After
Bond-i's direct descendants are everywhere in the current market. The European Investment Bank issued a €100 million digital bond on Ethereum in April 2021 — the first digital bond by a public institution in Europe. The Hong Kong government issued HK$800 million in tokenized green bonds in 2023. Quincy, Massachusetts issued the first US blockchain municipal bond in April 2024. The Siemens digital bond followed in Germany in the same period. DTCC's Canton Network July 2026 trades included US Treasury/repo DVP transactions that trace their institutional lineage directly to what bond-i established was possible.
None of those would have happened in the timeline they happened without bond-i demonstrating that a supranational issuer with the highest possible credit rating, managing real institutional capital, could use blockchain infrastructure for a live bond — and have it perform identically to any other bond.
→ Quincy, MA — the first US blockchain municipal bond (2024)
→ RWA Timeline — bond-i in the full milestone sequence
→ Siemens digital bond — how the corporate sector followed