BlockBeats News, March 6th, the Bank of Canada has completed a tokenized bond pilot project named Project Samara with several major Canadian banks, testing the feasibility of issuing, trading, and settling bonds on a distributed ledger.
In this experiment, Export Development Canada, the official Canadian export credit agency, issued a 100 million Canadian dollar (approximately 73 million US dollars) bond with a maturity of less than three months and sold it to a small group of institutional investors. The project participants also included RBC Dominion Securities and RBC Investor Services Trust under Royal Bank of Canada, as well as TD Securities under Toronto-Dominion Bank.
The test results showed that a single blockchain-based platform could support the full lifecycle of a bond, including issuance, bidding, coupon payments, secondary market trading, and maturity redemption processes. Additionally, the project also tested the on-chain settlement using a wholesale digital Canadian dollar issued by the Bank of Canada, enabling funds and bonds to settle on the same ledger.
This pilot comes at a time when Canada is strengthening its regulation of digital assets. The government plans to introduce regulatory legislation for a Canadian dollar stablecoin and has passed a new cryptocurrency custody framework to enhance asset security and risk management for trading platforms.
