Canada’s government bond market made history when Export Development Canada (EDC) issued the country’s first tokenised bond using distributed ledger technology (DLT) — a milestone that places Canada at the forefront of a global movement to digitise the infrastructure of capital markets and potentially transform how bonds are issued, traded and settled. The issuance was completed under Project Samara, a collaborative initiative coordinated by the Bank of Canada that also involved RBC Capital Markets, RBC Investor Services and TD Bank Group — representing one of the most substantive real-world tests of DLT in a regulated capital markets setting anywhere in the world.
The bond itself was a C$100 million ($73.6 million) Canadian dollar-denominated security with a maturity of less than three months, issued to a closed group of institutional investors. While modest in size — reflecting the experimental nature of the project — the transaction was groundbreaking in its scope: it tested the full lifecycle of a bond, from issuance through bidding, coupon payment, secondary market trading and final redemption, all conducted on a single blockchain-based platform without relying on the fragmented, multi-intermediary systems that characterise conventional bond markets.
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What is Distributed Ledger Technology and Why Does It Matter for Bonds?
Distributed ledger technology — the broader category of blockchain-based systems — is a method of recording transactions across a network of computers in a way that is simultaneously shared, transparent and tamper-resistant. Unlike traditional financial infrastructure, where transaction records are held by individual custodians, clearinghouses and settlement systems that must communicate and reconcile with one another, a DLT platform creates a single authoritative ledger accessible to all authorised participants simultaneously.
For bond markets, which currently involve a complex chain of intermediaries — issuers, investment banks, custodians, clearinghouses, central securities depositories, settlement agents and registrars — DLT offers the theoretical promise of dramatic efficiency gains. If all parties share a single immutable record of bond ownership and transaction history, the need for bilateral reconciliation between their separate systems is eliminated. Settlement that currently takes two business days (T+2 in most markets) could theoretically occur instantaneously — or “atomically” — on a DLT platform, as both the bond transfer and the cash payment are recorded on the same ledger at the same moment.
Project Samara: Design and Execution
The Samara Platform was built on Hyperledger Fabric — a permissioned blockchain framework developed under the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project and widely used in enterprise and institutional applications. Unlike public blockchains such as Ethereum, where any participant can join and validate transactions, Hyperledger Fabric operates on an invitation-only basis, allowing designated participants to maintain privacy while benefiting from the shared ledger’s auditability and tamper-resistance.
The platform integrated separate bond and cash ledgers — critical design feature that allowed the bond token and the digital cash token to be transferred simultaneously without either party bearing settlement risk. The cash in the Project Samara experiment was settled in wholesale central bank deposits — a digital form of central bank money created specifically for the experiment and representing the highest possible form of settlement asset. The use of central bank money, rather than commercial bank deposits or stablecoin equivalents, was central to the experiment’s credibility: it demonstrated that DLT-based settlement can achieve the same finality and safety as conventional central bank settlement.
RBC Capital Markets operated the Samara Platform and served as lead manager on the bond issuance. TD Securities served as joint lead manager. The structure mirrors a conventional syndicated bond transaction in terms of the roles and responsibilities of the participants — but with the critical difference that all the documentation, bidding, settlement and ongoing administration occurred digitally on the shared platform rather than across multiple proprietary systems.
What the Experiment Revealed: Efficiency Gains and New Challenges
The Project Samara findings were nuanced and candidly presented by all participants — neither dismissing DLT’s potential nor overstating its near-term practicality. On the efficiency side, the experiment demonstrated meaningful gains: operational workflows were streamlined, data integrity was improved across participants, and settlement was genuinely faster and more reliable than in conventional systems. The ability to process coupon payments, secondary market trades and redemptions all on a single platform — with automatic reconciliation — eliminated a significant category of operational error that currently plagues conventional bond market infrastructure.
The experiment also revealed genuine challenges. The added technological complexity, liquidity costs and governance requirements partially offset the efficiency gains — a reminder that implementing DLT in a live financial environment is not simply a matter of replacing one software system with another. New governance structures are required to determine how the platform is operated, how disputes are resolved and how changes to the protocol are approved. These governance questions are familiar from the history of other financial infrastructure projects but are particularly acute in a DLT context where the decentralised architecture conflicts with the centralised decision-making structures of conventional financial institutions.
On regulatory dimensions, some centralised roles — including a marketplace operator, custodian and off-platform trade reporting — “highlighted gaps between the current regulatory framework and DLT principles.” In other words, DLT’s architecture, which distributes record-keeping across multiple participants, does not map cleanly onto regulatory requirements that presuppose a single authoritative record-keeper and single auditable report. Resolving these gaps will require not just technical innovation but regulatory adaptation — a process that is underway but will take several years to complete.
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EDC and Canada’s Capital Markets Innovation Agenda
Export Development Canada is a financial Crown corporation dedicated to helping Canadian businesses make an impact at home and abroad. Its participation in Project Samara is consistent with its mandate to use financial innovation to improve the efficiency and accessibility of capital markets tools for Canadian issuers. Scott Moore, EVP Finance and Chief Operating Officer at EDC, described the project as “an important step in deepening our understanding of tokenisation and distributed-ledger technology and how it can contribute to the efficiency and security of financial instruments to better serve investors, businesses and the financial community.”
The Bank of Canada’s Ron Morrow, Executive Director for Payments, Supervision and Oversight, framed the experiment’s value in terms of the central bank’s role as an enabler of innovation: “Project Samara shows how the public sector and industry can work together to harness innovation in the payment ecosystem. The Project allowed us to understand the real-world benefits and challenges of tokenization in capital markets. The Bank welcomes further collaboration in this fast-developing area.”
Project Samara builds on earlier experimental work from the Bank of Canada’s series of Jasper projects — an earlier series of blockchain-based clearing and settlement experiments that established foundational learnings about DLT in financial markets. Samara moves significantly beyond Jasper by using a real bond, real central bank money and a broader set of institutional participants, bringing the experiment much closer to live market conditions.
The Global Context: A Converging International Trend
Canada’s Project Samara is part of a global wave of tokenised bond experiments that spans multiple continents and jurisdictions. The Government of Hong Kong SAR has been particularly active, issuing digital green bonds in November 2025 in a fully digital format, integrating green bond disclosures with the digital assets platform and expanding issuance volume, tenor and currency reach relative to earlier 2023 and 2024 issuances. The International Capital Markets Association’s fintech tracker catalogues a growing universe of DLT bond applications across primary issuance, secondary market trading, settlement and lifecycle management — a body of evidence that is progressively building the case for wider adoption.
The European Investment Bank has issued multiple digital bonds on blockchain platforms, as have sovereign issuers in Singapore, the United Kingdom and several European jurisdictions. Each experiment has generated its own set of learnings, but a clear pattern is emerging: DLT delivers genuine efficiency benefits for bond lifecycle management, particularly in reducing settlement times and improving data integrity, but its adoption is constrained by regulatory gaps, integration challenges and the limited appetite of incumbent financial institutions to replace core infrastructure built over decades.
Tokenised Green Bonds: The Next Frontier
While Project Samara demonstrated DLT for a conventional government bond, the technology’s most exciting near-term application may be in green and sustainable bond markets. Tokenised green bonds could revolutionise the way environmental impact reporting is integrated with investor relations — with real-time data on project-level environmental outcomes embedded directly in the bond token and accessible to all bondholders simultaneously. This would eliminate the current reliance on periodic, often generic, third-party impact reports that provide limited assurance of actual environmental additionality.
The ability to link a bond token directly to the asset it finances — whether a solar farm’s energy generation data, a forest’s carbon sequestration measurements or a building’s energy efficiency metrics — and to trigger automatic coupon payments or principal adjustments based on verified environmental outcomes would represent a fundamental advance in the credibility and transparency of sustainable finance. As the Environmental Finance 2026 sustainable bonds analysis notes, digital issuance of green bonds is already happening — and Canada’s Project Samara provides a proof of concept for the technical infrastructure on which this innovation can be scaled.
The Bank of Canada’s stated intention to “welcome further collaboration in this fast-developing area” suggests that Project Samara is not a one-off experiment but the beginning of a more sustained programme of DLT innovation in Canadian capital markets. Whether the next step is a larger issuance, a broader set of participants or an experiment focused specifically on green or sustainable bonds, the precedent has been set: Canada’s government bond market can operate on a blockchain, and the experience has generated the institutional knowledge needed to do it again — better, larger and faster.
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Photo Source: Google
By: Montel Kamau
Serrari Financial Analyst
19th March, 2026
