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The Bank of Greece and German tokenisation platform SWIAT said they completed “Project Sovereign,” a simulation of a sovereign digital bond lifecycle on SWIAT’s blockchain, spanning issuance through secondary-market transactions, coupon payment and redemption. The partners described the exercise as being run in a sandbox under “real market conditions,” with the central bank acting as both issuer and central securities depository (CSD) with a registry for the simulated instrument.
Participants listed as investors in the simulation included Eurobank, National Bank of Greece, Piraeus Bank, Berliner Volksbank, DekaBank, KfW and LBBW. Ledger Insights, which reviewed the release, reported that the test covered end-to-end workflow elements normally handled across multiple institutions, including secondary transfers and corporate-action processing.
On settlement, the Bank of Greece and SWIAT said delivery-versus-payment was executed via an “asset blockchain” for the bond and a separate “payment blockchain” using simulated euro tokens, citing the lack of central bank digital currency options for the payment leg in this setup. They also said the design was inspired by the Bundesbank’s Trigger Solution concept for linking DLT platforms with the Eurosystem’s payment system, which the Bundesbank describes as a way to process DLT transactions in central bank money via RTGS dedicated cash accounts.
The regulatory framing in the materials is cross-border: SWIAT positions itself as operating regulated registry services under Germany’s Electronic Securities Act (eWpG) and says it has BaFin permission to maintain and operate crypto-securities registers. On the Greek side, the Bank of Greece notes its role managing the BoGS government securities settlement system under Law 2198/1994 on its market infrastructure page.
The exercise sits alongside prior European examples of blockchain-based securities issued or settled using SWIAT-linked workflows, including Siemens’ digital bond that Siemens says used the SWIAT permissioned blockchain with the Bundesbank Trigger Solution, and Berlin Hyp’s blockchain Pfandbrief, which Berlin Hyp says was issued on a SWIAT private blockchain with market-making arrangements for secondary trading. KfW has separately disclosed investing in Berlin Hyp’s blockchain Pfandbrief via an OTC transaction, underscoring that institutional participation in eWpG-based digital securities has already included real-asset-linked covered bond formats.
For issuers, CSDs, banks and regulated tokenisation providers, Project Sovereign documents a tested sequence for issuance, transfer and lifecycle events with a DvP construct using simulated cash, as described by the project parties. The announcement does not state that any live market issuance, live central bank money settlement, or production integration occurred, and the described setup is explicitly a simulation rather than a change in operating rules or market access.
