The Bank of Canada has completed Project Samara, a tokenization pilot that tested whether blockchain-based infrastructure could improve government bond issuance and settlement.
At the center of the experiment was the first tokenized bond in Canada settled in wholesale central bank deposits. Export Development Canada, the government-run trade finance unit, issued a single three-month, $100 million Canadian dollar-denominated bond to a closed investor group, with its lifecycle handled on the Samara Platform.
The pilot was run with TD Bank (TSX: TD) and the Royal Bank of Canada’s (TSX: RBC) markets and investor services units.
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Samara was built on Hyperledger Fabric and designed to manage the core mechanics of a bond program from issuance through bidding, coupon payments, redemptions, and secondary trading. It tested whether a tokenized architecture could support a broader bond lifecycle within a single coordinated environment.
The Bank of Canada said the pilot identified operational efficiency gains, improvements to data integrity, and reductions in counterparty and settlement risk. Those findings suggest tokenized rails can streamline reconciliation and reduce some frictions embedded in fragmented legacy workflows, particularly where multiple parties are involved across issuance and servicing functions.
The Bank of Canada was explicit that technical feasibility does not equal fast adoption. In its release, it said broader uptake will likely be slow due to integration challenges and limited appetite for core infrastructure changes.
Project Samara builds on the Bank of Canada’s earlier Jasper work, launched in 2016 with Payments Canada and private sector partners to test distributed ledger technology for wholesale interbank payments and securities settlement.
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