Golden Finance reported that Bank of Communications Hong Kong Branch recently issued a US$300 million unsecured floating-rate digital bond with a term of three years. It is Bank of China’s first digitally native bond, issued using HSBC’s Orion digital asset platform and cleared through Hong Kong’s Central Securities Depository (CMU). Moody's gave the bond a preliminary A2 rating, on par with a conventional bond issuance, despite Moody's negative outlook on China's sovereign rating. Moody's believes that the risks posed by blockchain have been effectively mitigated because the Orion platform uses a private permissioned blockchain and cash transactions are settled off-chain, avoiding the impact of platform failures on payments.