Canada has completed a distributed ledger technology (DLT) pilot that produced the country’s first tokenized bond, the Bank of Canada announced. Project Samara brought together the Bank of Canada, Export Development Canada (EDC), Royal Bank of Canada and TD Bank Group to test whether blockchain-style infrastructure can streamline issuance, trading and settlement of debt securities.
Under the pilot, EDC issued a CA$100 million (about US$73.6 million) bond with a maturity under three months to a closed group of investors. The security was issued, traded and settled on a DLT platform built on Hyperledger Fabric. The experiment used wholesale central bank deposits for payments instead of commercial bank money and integrated separate ledgers for cash and bonds to enable near-instant settlement.
The platform supported the bond’s full lifecycle — issuance, bidding, coupon payments, redemption and secondary trading — and participants reported operational improvements and stronger data integrity. The pilot highlighted potential benefits including faster settlement and reduced counterparty risk, while also underscoring trade-offs and barriers: governance questions, the need for regulatory alignment, and challenges integrating DLT systems with existing market infrastructure.
Project Samara joins a growing number of public- and private-sector initiatives exploring tokenized securities. Notable precedents include the World Bank’s 2018 A$110 million “Bond-i,” the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s 2022 Project Guardian investigations into DLT for wholesale markets, Hong Kong’s 2023 tokenized green bond, and a 2024 World Bank Swiss franc digital bond settled on the SIX Digital Exchange using wholesale central bank digital currency provided by the Swiss National Bank.
While experiments like Samara demonstrate technical feasibility and potential market efficiencies for tokenized bonds, participants and observers emphasize that broader adoption will depend on evolving legal, regulatory and operational frameworks and careful coordination across market participants and authorities.