Russia’s National Settlement Depository (NSD) has announced the issuance and initial placement of the first blockchain-based commercial bonds on the Russian market.

NSD teamed up with Raiffeisenbank Russia and mobile network operator MegaFon for the distributed ledger solution that will facilitate trading, placement, and record keeping for bonds to be simple and transparent. Raiffeisenbank Russia started the initial placement and subsequently purchased $10M worth of papers of MegaFon.

“NSD was among the first to experiment with blockchain in Russia, one of the reasons is enormous interest from our partners and clients. The ultimate goal NSD is to build blockchain infrastructure for any innovative financial product to operate on. Once the infrastructure is created, technology holds potential to deliver a large variety of financial products and services operated by smart contracts,” Chairman of NSD’s Executive Board Eddie Astanin said.

The work on the prototype framework started in the first quarter of 2017. The solution utilizes open-source Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 blockchain framework.

With this solution, all parties involved have access to the decentralized ledger and can monitor transactions and operations. Member sends a transaction to distributed ledger through smart contract, where it becomes a new operation in the commercial bond’s life-cycle. Then, following a distributed consensus procedure, the operation is verified and included into the ledger.

According to the official release, the set of smart contracts includes ones to facilitate issuance, secondary trading and redemption and available in open-source. It covers management of ownership on papers and connects to offchain payment system through custom interface.

“In the turbulent times when everyone waits to see what results corporate blockchain can achieve, it’s important to have a successful example with real money put into ledger. We spent the last three months working together with Raiffeisenbank Russia, MegaFon and Altoros as a team in 24/7 mode. It looks like a start of something big and new by running these smart contracts and creating new level of trust through distributed nature of this platform,” comments Alexander Yakovlev, Head of decentralized solutions direction at NSD.

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