Bank of Canada Completes Tokenized Bond Pilot, Cites Regulatory Hurdles
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 CA$100 million bond was issued by Export Development Canada (EDC) to a closed investor group through the Samara Platform.
The pilot found operational efficiency gains but warned that broader adoption will be slow due to integration challenges, liquidity costs, and gaps in the regulatory framework. 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.
According to the BoC's announcement, the experiment demonstrated operational efficiency gains, improved data integrity, and reduced counterparty and settlement risk. However, these benefits were 'partially offset' by increased system complexity and liquidity costs.