Spanish bank Banco Santander has launched a $20 million bond on the blockchain. The financial institution has also partnered with the Madrid City Council to develop a blockchain-powered application that will enable citizens to pay transport fare from a unified platform, according to an EnterpriseTimes report on October 18, 2019.

Bond on the Blockchain

Per the report, Banco Santander has forged ahead with a distributed ledger technology (DLT) initiative it began in 2016, to launch a $20 million bond on the on a distributed ledger.

According to the bank, the bond will only exist on the blockchain, and it marks the first step of possibly launching a secondary market for tokenized securities in the near future. Reportedly, Banco Santander is the issuer of the bond, and Santander Corporate and Investment Banking (SCIB), its global division, is working alongside the team.

Notably, the bond which will expire in a year is powered by the ethereum smart contracts blockchain.

Blockchain Bond Attracts Investors

Further reports reveal that a unit of Santander Group has already purchased the bond at market price, and the bond has a quarterly coupon of 1.98 percent. Also, the cash used to complete the investment and the coupon has been tokenized on the blockchain.

Commenting on the blockchain initiative, José García Cantera, Banco Santander’s CFO, said its $20 million bond is evidence that Santandar is at the forefront of the digital transformation of the financial sector.

“We want to take advantage of any technology that accelerates that process so that our clients progress and are faster and more efficient, and the blockchain is one of those technologies,”

Managing Transportation with DLT

In other news, Banco Santander has partnered with Vottun, a blockchain certification authority company, to launch a DLT-powered unified digital payment system for transport in the Spanish city of Madrid.

The team has hinted that the integration of DLT into the city’s transport system is part of the Madrid in Motion initiative, started by Empresa Municipal de Transportes de Madrid, a public transport company.

The application will also be used by commuters to pay for public rides, including buses, taxis, car rentals, e-scooters, and more within the city.

As such, the unified system will reduce the duplication of processes for users, eliminate the difficulty of trying to aggregate data about commuter transit patterns and enable the city’s management to function more efficiently.

Banco Santander remains one of the financial institutions exploring the potential of revolutionary blockchain technology.

On October 4, 2018, BTCManager informed that Banco Santander was hatching plans to launch a blockchain platform for cross-border payments.