Six of Canada’s largest banks are jointly exploring a Canadian-dollar tokenized deposit system intended to make payments faster, more efficient and programmable while keeping the underlying money inside regulated banking institutions. The initiative brings together BMO, CIBC, National Bank of Canada, RBC, Scotiabank and TD Bank Group, with an initial focus on transferring tokenized deposits between participating financial institutions before potentially connecting with other digital-asset infrastructure.
According to the banks’ joint announcement, the project is still in an exploratory stage. The first phase aims to establish how Canadian-dollar tokenized deposits could move efficiently across banks while preserving safety, stability and regulatory oversight. The participants have not yet disclosed the underlying ledger, technical architecture, launch date or whether the eventual system would operate around the clock.
Tokenized Deposits Keep Money Inside Banks
Tokenized deposits differ structurally from most stablecoins because they remain claims against commercial banks, much like conventional account balances, while adding a programmable digital representation that can move across compatible infrastructure. The model attempts to preserve regulated bank money while introducing some of the settlement and programmability benefits associated with tokenized systems. Similar questions are being examined elsewhere as central banks move tokenized money from experimentation toward wholesale financial infrastructure.
Canada has already been testing adjacent models. In March, the Bank of Canada, RBC, TD and Export Development Canada completed Project Samara, which issued and traded a tokenized bond using DLT while settling the cash leg in wholesale central-bank money. The Bank of Canada later joined BIS Project Agorá, which combines tokenized commercial-bank deposits with wholesale central-bank money for cross-border payments. The new six-bank initiative extends that experimentation toward commercial deposits themselves rather than tokenized securities alone.
Other markets are testing different versions of the same settlement problem. Japan has explored blockchain-based settlement using central-bank deposits, while payment networks have begun integrating stablecoin settlement directly into bank-facing infrastructure. These projects differ materially in legal structure and technology, but all examine how digitally represented money can reduce reconciliation and settlement friction between financial institutions.
Commercial Deployment Remains Undecided
The Canadian banks’ announcement is notably technology-neutral. It does not identify a public blockchain, permissioned ledger, shared token standard or settlement asset beyond Canadian-dollar tokenized deposits. Describing the project today as a 24/7 blockchain payment network would therefore go beyond what the participating institutions have confirmed. The banks also said additional deposit-taking institutions could be included at an appropriate stage, suggesting the initial six-bank structure may eventually broaden.
The longer-term ambition is interoperability with other emerging digital-asset initiatives. That direction resembles wider efforts to make tokenized fiat and conventional account-to-account payment infrastructure interoperable, but the Canadian project has not yet specified which external systems it could connect to. Interoperability remains an objective rather than an implemented feature.
The next concrete milestone will be disclosure of the project’s technical architecture and first-phase testing results. A selected ledger, operating model, settlement rules and evidence of transfers between participating banks would move the initiative from coordinated exploration toward functioning payment infrastructure. For now, the confirmed development is significant but narrower: Canada’s six major banks have agreed to jointly test whether tokenized commercial-bank deposits can become a more programmable rail for moving Canadian dollars between regulated institutions.