Canada's six largest banks are collaborating on a tokenized Canadian-dollar deposit network for inter-bank transfers.
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Six Canadian banks—RBC, TD, BMO, Scotiabank, CIBC, and National Bank—announced a joint initiative to build tokenized deposit infrastructure for Canadian dollars, with an initial focus on transfers between the participating institutions themselves. The project aims to create a system that is competitive and secure while maintaining existing safeguards for commercial bank money, with the banks expressing openness to other Canadian deposit-taking institutions joining eventually.
A tokenized deposit represents a regular bank deposit as a digital token on a shared ledger, operating under the same regulatory rules as conventional deposits but enabling faster settlement. The infrastructure would allow banks to move money between each other instantly and around the clock, with payments capable of triggering automatically—such as releasing funds when shipment documentation clears customs. These changes would operate invisibly to customers, functioning as background infrastructure rather than a consumer-facing product.
The initiative remains distinct from the Bank of Canada's digital-dollar proposal, which was shelved after a 2023 public consultation where 85 percent of nearly 90,000 respondents indicated they would not use a hypothetical digital Canadian dollar. The six banks have not announced a launch date, and opening the system to other institutions remains a stated goal rather than a confirmed commitment.