The register nobody closed

A bond ends in three steps. The issuer pays principal to the holders on the register at the record date. The register keeper closes the entry. Somebody writes down that it happened. For a conventional bond the third step is routine: a paying-agent notice, a stock-exchange announcement, a line in the issuer's investor relations page. For a tokenized bond there is a fourth step that has no equivalent in the old world: the tokens that represented the claim are cancelled on the ledger, or they are not.

We took every instrument in the Monitor with a maturity date on or before 15 October 2026 and searched, instrument by instrument, for any public record of redemption: issuer notice, paying-agent notice, registrar announcement, regulator or exchange filing, press release, auditor statement, or a statement that tokens were cancelled. Three independent research runs on the same list, reconciled against each other, then against the Monitor database and, where a public contract exists, against the chain.

Nine instruments met the test: the EIB's 2021 Ethereum bond and its 2022 Venus and 2023 Swedish krona bonds, the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti bond of 2024, the Republic of Slovenia's 2024 bond, the Société Générale SFH covered bond of 2020, UBS's CHF 375 million bond of 2022, KfW's first crypto security of 2024, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg's digital treasury certificates of 2025. Not small names. Between them, the most sophisticated issuers in Europe.

Not one of the nine has a statement from the issuer, the registrar or the paying agent saying the bond was redeemed. Not one says the tokens were cancelled or the register closed.

Three leave a trace on an exchange: the Luxembourg Stock Exchange records a final maturity and delisting date for the Société Générale, EIB Venus and EIB krona bonds. A delisting record is not a payment confirmation. It says the listing ended, not that the money moved.

One is still described as outstanding by its own issuer. UBS's investor relations page listed its CHF 375 million digital bond under "current issuances" in October 2026, eleven months after it matured.

Where we did find confirmations of redemption, they came from an unexpected place: the Deutsche Bundesbank. Its public log of the 2024 Trigger Solution trials records that KfW's EUR 50 million crypto security, and bonds and commercial paper from WIBank, DekaBank, BayernLB, L-Bank and Saxony-Anhalt, were redeemed in October and November 2024. A central bank's trial diary is, as far as we can tell, the only third-party record in Europe that says a tokenized bond was actually paid back. None of those entries says what happened to the tokens.

The only public statement we found that tokens were ever deleted is not about a maturity at all. In September 2026, KfW moved its EUR 100 million third crypto bond from Cashlink on Polygon to DekaBank on SWIAT, and the press release says the old tokens were deleted when the new ones were created. A registrar change is documented. Nine maturities are not.

So we asked the ledger instead. Of the 34 matured instruments in the Monitor, one has a public contract address we could read: the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti bond on Polygon. Its total supply on 15 October 2026 is zero. The tokens were cancelled. CDP, whose website says nothing about redemption, is the only instrument in the set whose closure anyone outside can verify, and only because the contract is public. Of the other 33, twenty-seven live on permissioned ledgers or in registers with no public token (SDX, Goldman's DAP, HSBC Orion, Canton, the German crypto securities registers), where no outsider can read anything. Six are on public chains, including KfW's first crypto bond, the Société Générale covered bond and the EIB's 2021 bond, but no contract address was ever published for them, so there is nothing to read.

The nine above are the ones with a maturity date in a prospectus or press release. The other 25 are instruments, most of them German crypto securities issued by small and mid-sized companies, where the maturity is in the instrument's name and nowhere else: a convertible 2022/2025, a corporate bond 2022/2023, another 2023/2024, notes due 31 March 2025, a 14 percent bond 2024/2025 whose issuer entered preliminary insolvency proceedings before it matured. For the ones we could identify by ISIN, the search returns nothing at all. No notice, no filing, no exchange, no central bank, no public contract. The investor who bought a one-year crypto security in 2023 has, in public, no way of knowing whether the entry was ever closed, except by looking at their own bank account.

Germany is the only jurisdiction in our set that wrote the end of a crypto security into statute. The Electronic Securities Act defines Löschung, the marking of a registered security and its terms as void. The registrar may delete only on instruction and with the issuer's consent, and an unauthorised deletion is an administrative offence. From 1 January 2025 the Act also required issuers to notify BaFin of every deletion, and BaFin to publish the deletion date on its public list of crypto securities. On 10 February 2026 that section was struck by the Standortfördergesetz (BGBl. I 2026 Nr. 33). For thirteen months Germany had a statutory public record of which tokenized bonds had been closed. It no longer does.

France never had one. Nothing in the Code monétaire et financier, the 2017 ordinance or the 2018 decree on the dispositif d'enregistrement électronique partagé requires the register to be closed, the tokens to be cancelled, or anyone to be told. The DEEP must guarantee the integrity of its entries. It does not have to say when they stop meaning anything.

Elsewhere the picture is thinner and we would rather say so than guess. Swiss law provides a court procedure to cancel a ledger-based security when the keys are lost, which tells you the problem was anticipated. Italy and Spain both put a named, supervised register keeper in charge of the instrument's life; what that keeper must publish when the instrument ends, we have not yet been able to cite article by article. We will return to these when we can.

A bond that matures and leaves no trace is not a bond that went wrong. In all likelihood every one of the nine was paid, on time, in full. The gap is not in the payment. It is in the record.

That gap has a cost. A token that still exists after the claim it represented has been extinguished is a token that can be transferred, pledged, counted in a portfolio, or shown to a lender. An auditor who asks "is this position still live?" gets no public answer. A registrar who takes over an instrument mid-life, as DekaBank did from Cashlink, inherits a ledger with no public history of what was closed and when. And a regulator who wants to know how many tokenized securities are outstanding in its market cannot subtract the ones that ended, because nobody wrote them down.

Conventional markets solved this with boring infrastructure: paying agents who publish, central securities depositories that cancel, exchanges that delist on a schedule everyone can read. Tokenized bonds were supposed to make that infrastructure cheaper. In the first seven years, they have mostly made it optional.

Quavvo runs the register and the coupon and redemption runs of tokenized bonds after issuance, under the issuer's mandate. The last run of every instrument we service ends the same way: principal computed at the record date, approved by two people, paid by the issuer's paying agent, the register entry closed, the redemption recorded against the chain, and a signed statement that says so, with the on-chain cancellation reference once the issuer or its platform has burned the tokens, delivered to the issuer, the holders and anyone the issuer names. That statement is the thing we could not find for the nine bonds above.

The Monitor will carry three new fields from this note onward: scheduled and final maturity, redemption evidence (none, exchange, central bank, issuer, registrar), and on-chain cancellation with its date. If you issued or service one of the instruments above and have a redemption record we missed, send it to hello@quavvo.com and we will add it, with credit.

Cohort: instruments in the Quavvo Market Monitor with a maturity date on or before 15 October 2026 (313 instruments tracked at the time of writing): 9 with a documented maturity date, 25 whose maturity is carried in the instrument name and was dated from it (year-only names were taken as year-end). Evidence search run three times independently on the same list and reconciled; sources are primary where available (issuer, regulator, exchange, central bank), press otherwise. Exchange records were counted separately from redemption statements. On-chain supply read on 15 October 2026 from the contract addresses stored in the Monitor; one of 34 had a public address. One correction to our own data came out of this: the Société Générale SFH 2020 covered bond is a soft bullet, scheduled May 2025, final maturity May 2026; the Monitor previously showed only the first date. The 25 name-dated instruments were not individually searched for redemption notices beyond those identifiable by ISIN. We did not look at non-European instruments. Everything above is a statement about public records, not about whether any issuer paid.

Quavvo Market Monitor, instruments.json and contract read of 15 October 2026 (Polygon, 0x12e6ba31684566d91347a33cb38dceb65977db2c); Luxembourg Stock Exchange security pages for FR0013510518, LU2542747121, LU2637450516; UBS bondholder information, digital bonds; Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, digital bond page; Deutsche Bundesbank, "Conducted trials and experiments with the Trigger Solution"; KfW press release, 24 September 2026; Gesetz über elektronische Wertpapiere §§ 4, 18, 20 (version 1 January 2025 to 9 February 2026), 31; Standortfördergesetz of 4 February 2026, BGBl. I 2026 Nr. 33 (9 February 2026); Code monétaire et financier L.211-3, R.211-9-7; Ordonnance 2017-1674; Décret 2018-1226; Swiss Code of Obligations Art. 973d to 973i.