Bank of Canada Completes CA$100M Tokenized Bond Pilot with Warnings of Slow Adoption

The Bank of Canada has completed Project Samara, a blockchain experiment that issued Canada's first tokenized bond on a distributed ledger platform.

The pilot found operational efficiency gains but warned that broader adoption 'will likely be slow' due to integration challenges, liquidity costs, and gaps in the regulatory framework.

Export Development Canada (EDC) issued a single three-month CA$100 million bond to a closed investor group on the Samara Platform. TD Bank served as joint lead manager, and RBC Investor Services provided bond reconciliation.

The BoC built Samara on Hyperledger Fabric to handle the full bond lifecycle - issuance, bidding, coupon payments, redemptions, and secondary trading - on a single permissioned ledger.