Slovenia has issued its first Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) bond as the first EU country and one of the few countries in the world to do so, according to the Finance Ministry.

Slovenia issued €30 million of the digital bonds, which mature in four months. The bond has a coupon rate of 3.65% and will mature on 25 November.

Slovenia is working to introduce new technologies in the management of government debt and in the financial market in general.

The ministry said such issues and experimenting with tokenised central bank money were an important step towards greater transparency and efficiency of financial markets.

Although this type of technology is not very widespread in financial markets, the ministry expects it to become significantly more widely used in the coming years.

"The issue of the digital bond shows Slovenia uses state-of-the-art financial technology and is among the most advanced and innovative countries in the global financial sphere," the ministry said.

Distributed ledger technology is an umbrella term for technologies including blockchain. Its main feature is increased security against counterfeiting and unwanted copying.

The bond was issued as part of the European Central Bank's pilot programme for the settlement of wholesale financial transactions in central bank money. The DLT solution of the Bank of France was used for the cash settlement part of the issue.

The French banking giant BNP Paribas acted as the organiser of the issue and operator of the DLT Neobonds tokenisation platform.