Bank of Canada Completes Tokenized Bond Pilot, Warns on Broader Adoption
The Bank of Canada has successfully completed its Project Samara, a blockchain-based pilot that issued Canada's first tokenized bond. The CA$100 million bond was issued by Export Development Canada (EDC) 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 the platform using Hyperledger Fabric to handle the full bond lifecycle - issuance, bidding, coupon payments, redemptions, and secondary trading - on a single permissioned ledger.
The pilot demonstrated operational efficiency gains, improved data integrity, and reduced counterparty and settlement risk. However, the BoC warned that broader adoption will likely be slow due to integration challenges with existing infrastructure and limited appetite among market participants for core infrastructure changes.
Project Samara is part of a broader global trend, where central banks have run analogous tokenized bond pilots over the past three years, most reaching similar conclusions: technically feasible, commercially uncertain, and dependent on regulatory frameworks that do not yet exist at scale.