Bank of Canada Achieves Historic Milestone: Canada's First Tokenized Bond Issued Through Project Samara

Ottawa, March 6, 2026 – The Bank of Canada announced yesterday the successful completion of Project Samara, a pilot experiment marking a Canadian first: the issuance of a tokenized bond (represented digitally on a distributed ledger) valued at C$100 million. This short-term bond (maturity of less than 3 months) was issued by Export Development Canada (EDC), a Crown corporation specializing in international trade financing. It was sold, traded, and managed throughout its lifecycle on the Samara Platform, an infrastructure built on distributed ledger technology (DLT). Key partners in the project included RBC Capital Markets and RBC Investor Services (which operated the platform), as well as TD Securities (the capital markets division of TD Bank Group), acting as joint lead managers for the issuance. Regulators—the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), and the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO)—granted experimental exemptions to enable this innovative test. A Unified Platform for the Entire Bond Lifecycle Built on Hyperledger Fabric (a permissioned distributed ledger), the Samara Platform integrates two separate ledgers: one for securities (tokenized bonds) and one for cash. This enables atomic settlement—instantaneous and simultaneous—eliminating traditional delays and counterparty risks. The project covered the full process:

Issuance and bidding Coupon payments (interest) Redemption at maturity Secondary market trading

All payments were settled in wholesale central bank money (wholesale central bank deposits), issued directly by the Bank of Canada on the ledger. Concrete Benefits, but Cautious Outlook on Adoption According to the Bank of Canada's Staff Analytical Paper 2026-8, released yesterday, the experiment shows that "the issuance and settlement of real financial instruments using DLT are technically feasible" and deliver gains in data integrity, reduced settlement risks, and faster operations. However, the Bank remains measured: "Widespread adoption will likely be slow" due to integration costs with existing systems, liquidity requirements, the current regulatory framework, and operational challenges. Project Samara builds on prior work from the Project Jasper series, which began exploring DLT for payments and capital markets as early as 2016. Toward Modernizing Canadian Capital Markets? As Carolyn Rogers, Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, stated in the official release: “Project Samara shows how the public sector and industry can work together to harness innovation in the payment ecosystem.” While this is not a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC)—it focuses on wholesale money for institutional use—this milestone positions Canada among countries actively exploring asset tokenization, a global trend that could transform bond, equity, and other financial markets. Full details and the technical report are available on the Bank of Canada website. It remains to be seen whether this limited pilot will lead to broader deployments in the coming years. For now, it represents a concrete step toward more efficient, transparent… and digital capital markets.