BIS Hub Launches Project Genesis to Explore Green Bond Tokenization
The Hong Kong Center of the Innovation Hub of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) announced a joint project to build a prototype digital infrastructure that can enable green investments and help issuers and governments to meet environmental and sustainability goals. These two entities have joined forces with the technology industry via Project Genesis, to build this prototype digital infrastructure. The Project Genesis will explore the tokenization of green bonds to enable investments in small denominations, combined with real-time tracking of environmental outputs. The results of the tests and prototypes will be published in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Project Genesis is the first green finance project of the BIS Innovation Hub. Through this project, the Hub seeks to show "the green art of the possible" by combining blockchain, smart contracts, internet-of-things, and digital assets. The prototypes will allow policy makers and stakeholders to explore innovative approaches to green bond distribution and transparency. After starting with design thinking workshops, the development teams are now working in iterative sprints to build the prototypes while collaborating with key stakeholders in the Hong Kong financial ecosystem. Genesis will be developed with six partner companies:
- Digital Asset (Switzerland) and GFT Technologies Hong Kong will deploy multiple permissioned blockchains.
- The Liberty Consortium, comprising SC Ventures, Standard Chartered Bank, and Shareable Asset, will be leverage a public, permission-less blockchain infrastructure.
- Allinfra, a Hong Kong Special Administrative Region start-up, will provide technology verified data that can track in real-time the positive environmental impact of projects.
Genesis is guided by a multi-disciplinary panel of experts in environmental, social and governance (ESG), green finance, bond markets, law, and regulation; this is in line with the insight derived from the BIS Green Swan research report (published in January 2020) that climate change involves complex collective action problems that require increased coordination among governments, private sector, civil society, and international community.
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Keywords: International, Asia Pacific, Hong Kong, Banking, Green Bonds, ESG, Sustainable Finance, Project Genesis, Blockchain, Smart Contracts, Regtech, BIS Innovation Hub, Suptech, BIS, HKMA
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