At the CzechCrunch Money Maker event in Prague, Czech National Bank (CNB) Governor Aleš Michl announced that the bank had issued its first test bonds using distributed ledger technology (DLT). The trial successfully tested bond purchases and sales, interest payments and lending against the bonds as collateral.
Each bond had a nominal value of CZK 10,000. Transactions ran on the DLT platform operated by the Prague Stock Exchange’s Central Securities Depository, with Česká spořitelna as counterparty. The CNB Lab project tested a model that allows bond rules to execute automatically and transactions to settle around the clock, with records visible only to the counterparties.
Michl linked the trial to developing both a market for assets denominated in koruna and domestic settlement infrastructure. He called for central banks to participate from the outset so that settlement has central bank money at its core, rather than private money such as stablecoins.