Bank of Canada, Major Banks Complete Canada’s First Tokenized Bond Pilot
The Bank of Canada and several major Canadian banks completed Project Samara, the country’s first live-market pilot of tokenized bond settlement using central bank money. The pilot executed real-time transfers of tokenized securities on distributed ledger technology and settled payments with central bank funds, testing operational integration, messaging and payment finality in a market setting on March 6, 2026.
The successful pilot is a practical proof point for wholesale CBDC use cases and tokenized asset workflows: it showed potential for faster settlement, lower settlement risk, and clearer liquidity management for treasury desks. Regulators and market infrastructures will now focus on scalability, cross-border interoperability and legal clarity; next steps are likely expanded pilots and workstreams on resilience, governance and industry standards that could reshape fixed-income post-trade operations.