Qatar’s Doha Bank issues $150M digital bond on private ledger

Doha Bank, one of Qatar’s largest private commercial lenders, has issued a $150 million digital bond on a private distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform, becoming the latest financial institution to shun public blockchains.

The bank issued the floating rate Digitally Native Notes (DNN) on the London Stock Exchange via the Digital Financial Market Infrastructure (D-FMI), a platform developed by Belgium-based financial market giant Euroclear.

“The successful issuance of Doha Bank’s inaugural DNN marks a significant milestone in our strategy to diversify and strengthen our funding base,” commented CEO Sheikh Abdulrahman Bin Fahad Al-Thani.

By issuing the bond on a DLT platform, the bank achieved T+0 settlements, eliminating counterparty risk, lowering the collateral needs, enhancing operational efficiency, and allowing investors to reuse their capital immediately. Al-Thani believes that this innovative move will also attract new global investors into the Qatari financial market and “reinforce confidence in Qatar as a forward-looking financial hub.”

“This achievement reflects strong global investor appetite for Qatar and aligns closely with the Qatar Central Bank’s Third Financial Sector Strategy and the Government’s vision to advance digital transformation resilience and competitiveness of the Qatari capital market,” he added.

Doha Bank joins a growing list of financial institutions opting for private DLT platforms over public blockchains. While digital bonds were initially a preserve of the blockchain sector, a few financial giants have now taken over with their private platforms.

Euroclear’s D-FMI dominates the sector. Since the World Bank issued the first digital bond on the platform two years ago to raise €100 million, it has attracted some of the world’s largest financial firms. Cumulatively, the platform has been used to issue just over $1 billion in digital bonds.

The largest issuance by far has been by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which raised $500 million across two digital bond issuances in 2024. The Türkiye İş Bankası and France’s Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations have each raised $100 million.

The financial institutions claim that private DLT offers legal certainty, finality, and easier Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) compliance. They also offer enhanced privacy (but BSV offers stronger privacy via overlay networks) and are easier to integrate into existing rails, which these companies already control.

However, ultimately, financial institutions are stuck on private DLTs to maintain control. On these rails, they get to replicate the existing power structures while attracting the tech-savvy investors. While it serves their purpose, private DLT limits innovation, slows down experimentation, and prevents healthy competition that would benefit the consumers.

Watch: Richard Baker on engineering a smarter financial world with blockchain

title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen=””>