Ontario Securities Commission, Quebec Autorité des marchés financiers and Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization approve Project Samara pilot for tokenized Export Development Canada bonds settled in Bank of Canada wholesale digital Canadian dollars

The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), Quebec’s Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) and the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) approved Project Samara, an experimental research project testing distributed ledger technology for end-to-end bond issuance, trading and settlement, including settlement using digital representations of wholesale Canadian dollars created and managed by the Bank of Canada on the ledger. The consortium includes RBC Dominion Securities, RBC Investor Services Trust, TD Securities (Toronto-Dominion Bank and TD Securities Inc.), the Bank of Canada and Export Development Canada (EDC), with RBC operating the platform. The pilot covers a “tokenized” EDC bond issuance and related lifecycle processes including bidding, coupon payments, redemption, secondary trading and settlement, and is being facilitated through the regulators’ innovation testing environments (OSC LaunchPad, AMF Laboratory and CIRO InnovateSafe). The consortium will publish a research report with key findings on the potential benefits of issuing and trading bonds using distributed ledger technology. Separately, the Canadian Securities Administrators have launched a “Project Tokenization” theme in the CSA Collaboratory and are inviting stakeholders to express interest in contributing via a survey.