BondbloX, the Singapore regulated fractional bond exchange that uses DLT, announced a $6 million Series B funding. Beacon Venture Capital, part of Thailand’s Kasikornbank (KBank), is one of the backers joining existing investors Citi, MassMutual Ventures, Potato Productions and Octava.
Typically bonds have minimum investment amounts of around $200,000. BondbloX acquires conventional bonds and holds them with a custodian. It then fractionalizes the bond, enabling investors to buy amounts as low as $1,000.
“The bond market is broken globally, and BondbloX is on a mission to allow individual investors the same access to the market that institutional firms enjoy,” said Dr. Rahul Banerjee, Co-Founder and CEO of BondBlox.
BondbloX launched in 2020. However, until last month BondbloX was only open to professional and accredited investors, but it is now allowed to sell to retail investors. The startup says it has seen strong global interest.
In other recent changes, BondBlox expanded to Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City) in India. It’s also eyeing potentially listing U.S. bonds, both corporate and Treasuries.
Citi has been custodian for the conventional bonds for a couple of years. However, in September it also became a custodian for the digital bonds, opening access to Citi’s clients.
“BondbloX is truly innovating Bond investing and disrupting an asset class which has lagged in digitization,” said Thanapong Na Ranong, Managing Director of Beacon VC. “The use of distributed ledger technology coupled with traditional financial custodians excites us and has great potential to re-shape the bond market for all.”
The concept of fractionalization and DLT usually goes hand in hand with tokenization. However, we believe these fractional bonds are digital representations but not tokens. BondbloX uses the Hyperledger Sawtooth enterprise blockchain.
