Société Générale FORGE: Digital Bond Issuance and Institutional Tokenization
SG-FORGE is the most regulated bank-proprietary tokenization subsidiary in Europe — holding a PSAN registration, issuing legal bonds on Ethereum mainnet, and settling them with its own euro stablecoin.
Overview
Société Générale FORGE — formally SG-FORGE SAS — is the digital asset subsidiary of Société Générale Group, established in 2018 as a dedicated entity to explore and operationalize blockchain-based capital markets activities. Unlike internal blockchain teams at many banks, SG-FORGE has pursued an unusual degree of regulatory autonomy: it holds a PSAN (Prestataire de Services sur Actifs Numériques) registration from the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), France’s securities regulator, making it one of the few bank subsidiaries in Europe to operate as a separately registered digital asset services provider.
SG-FORGE’s activities span digital bond issuance on public blockchains, the use of ERC-3643 (T-REX Protocol) through its partnership with Tokeny Solutions, the issuance of covered bond instruments as non-fungible tokens, and the development of EUR CoinVertible (EURCV) — a euro-denominated stablecoin issued on Ethereum and used for on-chain settlement of SG-FORGE bond transactions.
FORGE Subsidiary Structure and PSAN Registration
The French PSAN framework — established under the PACTE Law of 2019 and administered by the AMF — provides a registration regime for digital asset service providers that is distinct from the banking license held by Société Générale S.A. SG-FORGE’s PSAN registration covers the custody of digital assets and the purchase/sale of digital assets for legal tender — the two most relevant PSAN service categories for an entity issuing and settling digital securities.
The PSAN framework in France operates on a registration (not authorization) basis for the core custody and exchange categories, with an optional enhanced authorization tier that confers expanded rights and higher compliance obligations. France’s PSAN regime was among the first in Europe to provide a formal regulatory pathway for bank-affiliated digital asset entities, and SG-FORGE’s registration is among the earliest held by a major bank subsidiary.
Under MiCA — which superseded the PSAN regime’s most relevant provisions from December 2024 — SG-FORGE’s activities will be regulated under the CASP (Crypto-Asset Service Provider) framework. French entities holding PSAN registrations have an 18-month transitional period under MiCA to obtain full CASP authorization, placing SG-FORGE’s MiCA compliance timeline in the 2025-2026 period.
EUR 100M Digital Bond on Ethereum
SG-FORGE has executed multiple digital bond issuances on Ethereum mainnet, with aggregate issuance volume exceeding EUR 100 million. The most prominent was SG-FORGE’s participation in the European Investment Bank (EIB) digital bond program, a EUR 100 million two-year bond issued in April 2021 using smart contracts on Ethereum — one of the first public blockchain bond issuances by a supranational institution.
The EIB transaction involved three book-running banks — Goldman Sachs, Santander, and Société Générale — and settled in digital cash (central bank digital currency) through a Banque de France wholesale CBDC experiment conducted simultaneously. This settlement mechanism — tokenized securities delivered against tokenized central bank money — achieved atomic DvP on Ethereum mainnet, using the Banque de France’s experimental wCBDC rather than a commercial stablecoin.
The bond was issued as digital registered bonds under French law (obligations numériques), a legal category created by ordinance in December 2017 that allows certain debt instruments to be issued and transferred using shared electronic recording devices — the French legal framework for blockchain-based securities that predates the EU DLT Pilot Regime.
OFH Tokens: Covered Bonds as NFTs on Ethereum
Among SG-FORGE’s most technically distinctive activities is the issuance of OFH tokens — Obligations de Financement de l’Habitat — as non-fungible tokens on Ethereum. OFH bonds are French covered bonds (obligations foncières) backed by residential mortgage loans, regulated under the French monetary and financial code, and issued by specialized credit institutions (SCF). SG-FORGE issued OFH tokens as NFTs representing individual covered bond tranches.
The choice of NFT format — ERC-721 rather than the ERC-20 or ERC-3643 format used for fungible securities — reflects the structure of covered bond tranches, which have unique characteristics (maturity, coupon, ISIN, nominal amount) that distinguish each tranche from others. The NFT representation preserves these unique characteristics in the token metadata while providing blockchain-based transferability and settlement capability.
OFH token issuances were made to SG-FORGE’s parent group as part of covered bond refinancing operations — a use of blockchain infrastructure to tokenize an internal treasury operation rather than to access external capital markets. This internal-first approach is common among bank tokenization initiatives: proving the technical and legal mechanics within a controlled environment before opening the infrastructure to external counterparties.
ERC-3643 and Tokeny Partnership
SG-FORGE uses ERC-3643 through Tokeny Solutions for its fungible digital bond issuances. The partnership provides the compliance infrastructure — ONCHAINID-based investor identity verification, the Compliance Module for transfer restrictions, and the Identity Registry for investor whitelisting — that allows digital bond transfers on Ethereum to enforce the investor eligibility requirements applicable to institutional fixed income instruments.
The practical implication is that a SG-FORGE digital bond on Ethereum mainnet will reject a transfer to a non-whitelisted address at the blockchain layer — a technical enforcement of legal transfer restrictions that would otherwise require off-chain transfer agent intervention. For institutional investors in SG-FORGE digital bonds, this means the custody infrastructure must support ERC-3643 token interactions, and the investor’s Ethereum address must be registered in the SG-FORGE Identity Registry through the Tokeny/ONCHAINID verification process.
EUR CoinVertible (EURCV) and On-Chain Settlement
EUR CoinVertible (EURCV) is a euro-denominated stablecoin issued by SG-FORGE on Ethereum, launched in 2023. EURCV is issued under French commercial law, backed by euro-denominated assets held in reserve, and accessible exclusively to institutional investors who have completed SG-FORGE’s KYC onboarding process. It is not a public stablecoin — EURCV is not available on retail exchanges and is specifically designed for institutional settlement of SG-FORGE digital securities transactions.
EURCV provides the cash leg for atomic DvP settlement of SG-FORGE digital bonds: a buyer of a SG-FORGE digital bond can settle the purchase by transferring EURCV to the seller simultaneously with receipt of the bond token, achieving near-instantaneous settlement without reliance on traditional TARGET2 or correspondent banking infrastructure.
Under MiCA, EURCV would be classified as an electronic money token (EMT) — a category that requires authorization as an electronic money institution (EMI) in the EU. SG-FORGE’s regulatory pathway for EURCV under MiCA is a matter of ongoing regulatory engagement with the AMF and the ACPR.
Further Resources
- Tokeny Solutions — ERC-3643
- ESMA — MiCA Implementation
- MiCA Regulation Overview
- Jurisdiction Profiles — France
- Tokenization Encyclopedia
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