The World Bank has released the second round of its blockchain bonds. It has raised about $33.8 million by creating a "blockchain-operated debt instrument," according to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The bank joined up with TD Securities and RBC Capital Markets for the sale.
New and existing investors were involved in the transactions, according to Coin Desk. The World Bank has collectively issued $108 million worth of these bunds, which are featured on a private version of its Ethereum blockchain. CommBank noted that this bond is the "first...created, allocated, transferred, and managed" with the use of distributed ledger technology.
Andrea Dore, head of funding at the World Bank, spoke at a press release, where she expressed happiness for the support and collaboration they have seen from both partners and investors. She added that the "innovation and experience in the capital markets" played a big part in helping member countries to experience a boost in productivity in their respective economies, as well as to experience accelerated progress to "Sustainable Development Goals."
With this being said, it seems that the World Bank is going on a very expensive way in attaining its goals. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had said that blockchain is "almost full" and that its "lack of scalability" is a big weakness, keeping organizations away instead of allowing them to join in the network.
Buterin also said in an interview with The Star-as reported by the Next Web-that Ethereum use is "very expensive" and any entity using the network adds up to the cost of using it. He added that bigger organizations make Ethereum more fuller, and means more competition (with everyone else) for space to be used in various transactions.
This, however, remains to be seen. Buterin says that major corporations have yet to join public blockchains and, as such, they are to be considered partly full. He cited software giant Microsoft as one of these major corporations that is slowly becoming more comfortable with public blockchains in comparison with working with "half-decentralized" private blockchain networks.
The World Bank is having a field day with its own blockchain, though. It is confident-through their initial blockchain offering-that the technology demonstrated how it can deliver on risk management, transparency, and efficiency when compared to the existing methodologies available in the market today.
It was only a year ago when the World Bank issued an announcement of the first $81 million issuance of their bond-i. In May this year, the World Bank, together with CommBank, started to record secondary bond trading using blockchain.
