Canada Completes Blockchain Bond Pilot, Warns Adoption Will Be Slow
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 involved Export Development Canada (EDC) issuing a 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.
The experiment 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, liquidity costs, and gaps in the regulatory framework.