Canada Is Building Its Tokenized Money Rails. Here Is How Banks Can Build for What Comes Next

I came back from Sibos in Miami with a ton of clarity. Canadian banks see that tokenized money is becoming part of how treasury and payments will work, and they want a say in how it is built.

The last few weeks show it. On September 10, OSFI said tokenized deposits are not legally different from traditional deposits. On September 22, BMO, CIBC, National Bank, RBC, Scotiabank and TD announced they are jointly exploring Canadian dollar tokenized deposits, starting with payments between their own institutions. A week later, BMO, CIBC and Scotiabank joined the BIS’s Project Agorá, where TD already participates through TD Bank N.A. and the Bank of Canada has been a member since May.

I think that is a big shift. Not long ago, mentioning blockchain to a bank would usually end the conversation politely (because Canadians are polite!) but rather quickly. 

A Strong Signal from Canadian Banks

Canadian banks now appear in almost every major initiative around the world.

1. Project Agorá: The BIS project tests tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits on one shared platform. In July’s real-value testing, 28 institutions and central banks completed live transactions, and the average time from initiation to settlement was about 80 seconds.
2. The Canadian six-bank initiative: This is Canada’s first domestic tokenized deposit effort. It has not yet named a platform, vendor or timeline.
3. The USD stablecoin company: Scotiabank and TD are among the 21 institutions forming a jointly owned USD stablecoin issuer, with launch targeted for the first half of 2027.
4. The Clearing House: BMO and TD are part of its tokenized deposit network for US dollars, connected to RTP and CHIPS.
5. Swift’s shared ledger: RBC and TD were among the banks that helped shape the design of Swift’s ledger for 24/7 tokenized deposit payments.

At home, the foundations are also in place:

1. Project Samara: In March, Canada issued its first tokenized bond, settled in central bank money.
2. CADD: In May, a regulated Canadian dollar stablecoin issued by Tetra Trust went live, backed by a group that includes National Bank, ATB, Shopify and Wealthsimple.
3. The Stablecoin Act: It received Royal Assent in March, with the Bank of Canada as supervisor and the framework expected to take effect in 2027.
4. Real-Time Rail: Payments Canada plans to start the phased launch this quarter.

99.4% of fiat-backed stablecoins, by market valuation, are pegged to the US dollar, and without a CAD option, Canadian businesses that want 24/7 programmable money will default to USD. In my conversations, Canadian banks factor in where Canadian dollar money moves and who governs those rails: settled in central bank money where it makes sense, with keys, data and policy staying inside the bank under OSFI’s oversight.

The Three Use Cases Canadian Banks Keep Coming Back To

In almost every conversation with Canadian banks, the discussion returns to the same three areas.

Tokenized Deposits

This is where most banks start. A tokenized deposit is still a deposit on the bank’s balance sheet. It can move 24/7, settle instantly and carry programmable conditions. That leaves banks with three open questions: which networks to join, how to connect them to core banking, and how to keep controls consistent across all of them.

Stablecoins and Stablecoin FX

Imagine a Canadian corporation converting CAD to CADD, then to USDC, then to a euro stablecoin such as Qivalis’s QEUR, and paying a European supplier on a Sunday. Three things have to be true for that to work:

1. A liquidity provider has to quote those pairs at size
2. Both legs of each swap have to settle together
3. The bank has to screen and approve every step

Bank FX desks are well placed to be that liquidity provider. The bank’s wallet and policy layer is what lets it act as the orchestrator without holding the coins itself.

Central Bank Money and Tokenized Collateral

Capital markets teams are very focused on collateral. Collateral sits idle today because it moves on batch cycles and business hours. In the US, DTCC received an SEC no-action letter for tokenized securities in December 2025, and the service is now in production. On July 15, Citadel Securities used Fireblocks to take part in DTC’s live tokenization initiative. It created tokenized US Treasuries, transferred them to counterparties and posted them to CME as collateral.

In Canada, CDS and CDCC already run the collateral and repo infrastructure that a Canadian version could build on. Samara showed that the Bank of Canada will settle in central bank money on a ledger. I think the pieces for a Canadian collateral network are there, which is exciting!

What the Future Could Look Like

Picture a few years from now. Each of the big six, plus Desjardins, ATB and others, issues tokenized deposits. Banks settle payments between each other in real time, any day of the week, against tokenized central bank money provided by the Bank of Canada. The Real-Time Rail and Lynx connect the tokenized world to the traditional one. A payment between two Canadian banks no longer waits for a settlement window, and there is no intraday credit exposure between the two banks.

None of this needs a new kind of money. It needs the money and assets that exist today to move on rails that are faster, programmable and always open.

How Banks Can Build Digital Asset Infrastructure Today 

The future is exciting, but no one can say which networks will be dominant. 

Bank of America’s Ebrahim Poonawala put it well after Sibos
“The rails will be shared. The edge won’t be. Networks expand reach; the real value comes from connecting them to clients’ liquidity, FX and cross-border needs.”

That is why I encourage banks to separate two decisions:

1. The rail decision: This is which consortiums and networks to join. It is a business and partnership question, and it will keep changing.
2. The stack decision: This is how the bank holds keys, applies policy, screens transactions and reconciles to its ledger. It is an architecture question, and it should be made once.

When the stack is designed properly, most of it will be the same on every network. The bank’s custody model, signing chain, approval workflows, screening, and audit trail do not change from one rail to the next. Joining a new network means adding a node connection, a wallet and a set of policy rules. It does not mean building a new platform.

For that to work, the digital asset  infrastructure has to meet three standards:

1. Secure: The bank controls its keys through MPC, HSM or both. Every transfer and every mint, burn or contract call goes through the bank’s policy and the approvers before anything is signed.
2. Scalable: It supports many networks, many legal entities and high volumes without the bank rebuilding its controls each time.
3. Rail-independent: It works with permissioned and public chains alike, so the bank can join a network, or leave one, without stranding its keys or its history.

This is the work Fireblocks does with more than 100 banks, including Qivalis, the 37-bank euro stablecoin consortium: an infrastructure and control layer the bank owns, whichever networks and rails win.