Guggenheim Treasury Securities (GTS) has issued $20 million in digital commercial paper on the Ethereum blockchain. GTS is a wholly owned subsidiary Guggenheim Capital with the group having more than $320 billion in assets under management (AUM). For the issuance, it partnered with Zeconomy, the developers of AmpFi.Digital.
The commercial paper received a P-1 rating for Moody’s.
Zeconomy says the digital issuance addresses DeFi challenges, such as poor credit quality and compliance issues.
While Zeconomy claimed this is the first Ethereum digital commercial paper, there have been a fair number of issuances, including on public blockchains.
That said, most have used private blockchains. Siemens recently issued a small commercial paper on the permissioned SWIAT blockchain, settled using JP Morgan’s JPM Coin. Earlier this year, Rabobank conducted €2 billion in commercial paper transactions using the Ubermorgen blockchain platform.
However, there have been issuances on public blockchains such as January’s $100 million launch by the Hong Kong arm of China’s GF Securities on Ethereum. Startup Obligate, which is backed by Swiss stock exchange SIX, is known for commercial paper issuances and uses the Polygon public blockchain.
In Europe, Orange and Citi launched a blockchain based central securities depository (CSD) for commercial paper, ID2S, back in 2019. Participants included CACEIS Bank, Crédit Agricole CIB, Orange Bank and Natixis. However, it shuttered two years later.
