Bank of Canada Completes Blockchain Bond Pilot with CA$100M Tokenized Note

The Bank of Canada has completed its 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 and regulatory gaps.

Export Development Canada (EDC) issued a single three-month CA$100 million bond to a closed investor group on the Samara Platform, with TD Bank serving as joint lead manager and RBC Investor Services providing bond reconciliation. The BoC built Samara on Hyperledger Fabric to handle the full bond lifecycle.

The experiment demonstrated operational efficiency gains, improved data integrity, and reduced counterparty and settlement risk. However, increased system complexity and liquidity costs were partially offset by these benefits.