Canada's Big Six Banks Unveil Tokenized Deposits Initiative

Canada's six largest commercial banks have formed an alliance to develop a tokenized deposits system denominated in Canadian dollars. The initiative brings together Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD), Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank), Bank of Montreal (BMO), Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), and National Bank of Canada.

The initial phase of the program aims to enable direct interbank transfers of digital representations of commercial money, operating under current prudential safeguards. This approach is designed to mitigate counterparty risks by keeping money within the traditional banking supervision perimeter.

The consortium confirmed that the infrastructure being explored has the technical goal of enabling continuous, 24/7 capital transfers equipped with programmability capabilities. The network will not permanently restrict its scope to its founding members, as participants anticipate the gradual onboarding of other regulated deposit-taking institutions as the software rollout progresses.