The Bureau of the Treasury (BTr) has successfully raised P15 billion through the country’s maiden issuance of tokenized treasury bonds (TTBs).
In a statement yesterday, the BTr said it saw strong demand from qualified institutional investors for the TTBs, with the size of the book reaching P31.426 billion, more than three times the target issue size of P10 billion.
This allowed the BTr to upsize the issue to P15 billion at 6.5 percent, aligned with the prevailing one-year secondary market rates despite the non-tradability of the TTBs.
The TTBs, whose settlement is scheduled for November 22, will be issued in the form of digital tokens to be maintained in the BTr’s Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Registry.
For the program, the BTr implemented a dual registry structure, with the DLT Registry running in parallel with the National Registry of Scripless Securities (NRoSS), with the NRoSS serving as the primary registry.
The BTr said the issuance of the TTBs demonstrates its commitment towards increased financial inclusion through the modernization of financial platforms and the reduction of friction costs, thus easing retail investor access to government securities.
“The bond tokenization program is anchored on the national government’s long-term vision of a financially inclusive domestic capital market. Through streamlining settlement procedures and minimizing friction costs, this initiative is a huge leap towards our end goal of democratizing investment and empowering our small investors,” Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno said.
“The initiative by the Bureau of Treasury to tokenize treasury bonds ties in with the broader digital transformation push and capital market development of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP),” BSP Governor Eli Remolona Jr. said.
“Our goal is to expand investment options so that more Filipinos can grow their money through these fixed-income investments while contributing directly to economic growth.
Right now, the focus is on institutional investors but hopefully, we can expand this project to retail investors over time,” Remolona added.
