Six of Canada’s largest banks are exploring a Canadian-dollar tokenized deposit system designed to move money faster between financial institutions. Tokenized deposits are digital representations of money already held at a bank, rather than separate stablecoins issued by a crypto company.
The initiative adds a payment use case to Canada’s growing work on tokenized financial markets. In March, the Bank of Canada, RBC and TD completed Project Samara, a test that issued, traded and settled a 100 million CAD bond on a distributed ledger using tokenized wholesale Canadian dollars.