Bitfinex’s recently launched Tether tokenized bond, which was hailed as a groundbreaking milestone in capital raising, appears to have fallen short of the investment and interest that the company had expected.
In October, Bitfinex Securities, a platform dedicated to listing tokenized real-world assets, announced its first tokenized bond called the ALT2611 Tokenized Bond. The product went live on November 15th.
However, after a two-week offering period, the official website reports that only $1.5 million out of the targeted $10 million has been raised.
The original announcement set a target of 100,000 ALT2611 tokens, equivalent to 10 million USDT, to be achieved within two weeks of the launch. However, it seems that the deadline has been extended by another two weeks, with only 15,000 ALT2611 tokens, or 15% of the target, being reached so far.
ALT2611 is a 36-month 10% coupon bond denominated in USDT, issued by Alternative, a Luxembourg-based securitization fund managed by Mikro Kapital.
Tokenized bonds are digital representations of traditional bonds issued on the blockchain, offering advantages such as liquidity, accessibility, security, transparency, and 24/7 trading compared to their traditional paper counterparts.
The minimum initial purchase size for this tokenized bond was 125,000 USDT, with secondary market trading available in denominations of 100 USDT. It’s important to note that ALT2611 is not available to American citizens or individuals present in the United States.
A crypto trader named Novacula Occami expressed his opinion on Bitfinex’s first USDT bond issue, referring to it as a failure. He further stated that USDT is unlikely to dominate capital markets, and BitFinex Securities Kazakhstan is not causing any concern among investment bankers.
However, Tether’s Chief Technology Officer, Paolo Ardoino, had initially described the tokenized bond as a revolutionary development in capital raising. He believed that it would establish USDT as the underlying denomination asset in this new financial system.
The Bitfinex tokenized bond was issued on the Liquid Network, which is a high-throughput Bitcoin sidechain.
In April, Bitfinex Securities obtained a Digital Asset Service Provider license in El Salvador, a country that has been exploring the possibility of issuing its own Bitcoin bonds.
According to Cointelegraph’s report in August, sovereign dollar bonds in the Central American nation have demonstrated strong performance, yielding a 70% return in 2023.