The consortium consists of Goldman Sachs Bank Europe SE, Santander Corporate and Investment Banking (SCIB) and Societe Generale.
This transaction involved lawyers from Allen & Overy’s Luxembourg, Germany, Spain, US and France offices, with a cross-border team led in Luxembourg and Madrid by capital markets partners Frank Mausen and Salvador Ruiz Bachs, with support from senior associate Philippe Noeltner.
The bond is in smart-contract format and has a built-in automated coupon feature. This transaction involves two central banks providing a tokenised representation of euro central bank money. It is the first digital bond to be fully subscribed on-chain and settling on T+0 basis through 2 interoperable permissioned blockchains.This digital bond will be listed on the Luxembourg stock exchange’s securities official list.
This latest transaction builds on our previous work advising EIB on its first blockchain bond in 2021, where Allen & Overy advised the same bank consortium on European Investment Bank’s issue of a digital bond on Ethereum public blockchain.
The EIB was advised by Clifford Chance. The cross-border Clifford Chance team advising the EIB consisted of Steve Jacoby (Luxembourg), Marc Benzler (Germany), Christian Hissnauer (Germany), Jonathan Lewis (Paris), Cédric Burford (Paris), Alexander Tollast (Paris), Federica Gamen (Luxembourg) and Thomas Guala Molino (Paris).
Ashurst advised Goldman Sachs in relation to its tokenisation platform.The Ashurst multidisciplinary and cross-border team was led by regulatory partner and Bank Industry Chair Etay Katz and counsel Sidika Ulker assisted by finance regulatory partner Bradley Rice, consultant David Capps, senior associates Sophie Skeet and Jamie Jefferson Ng and associates Hannah Pack and Hannah Sheikh. The wider team included Frankfurt-based finance regulatory partners Detmar Loff and Conrad Ruppel and associates Cornelius Hille, Tobias Bauerfeind and Gréta Müller, Paris-based finance regulatory partner Hubert Blanc-Jouvan and associate Francesco Assi, London-based digital economy partner David Futter, counsel Victoria Thompson, senior associate Denae Engelbrecht and associate Harry Newton, and London-based capital markets partner Anna Delgado and counsel Conor Funston. Partner Marc Mouton of Arendt & Medernach led on matters pertaining to Luxembourg law.
