RBC, TD, BMO, Scotiabank, CIBC, and National Bank announced Tuesday a joint plan for shared Canadian-dollar tokenized deposit infrastructure, starting with transfers between the six banks themselves. The project runs separately from the Bank of Canada's shelved digital-dollar plan, which most respondents in a public consultation said they wouldn't use.
Canada's six biggest banks agreed to build shared plumbing for digital money. RBC, TD, BMO, Scotiabank, CIBC, and National Bank announced Tuesday they're jointly exploring a Canadian-dollar tokenized deposit system, with the first phase limited to moving deposits between the banks themselves, not into consumer wallets.
Same money, different network
A tokenized deposit is a regular bank deposit represented as a digital token on a shared ledger — same money, same bank, same rules, just a different network. It is not a new cryptocurrency, and it is not a CBDC either.
According to the banks' joint statement: "competitive and secure" is how they described the goal, while keeping the safeguards that already govern commercial bank money. They also want the door open for other Canadian deposit-taking institutions to eventually join.
Moving money between banks in Canada today is slow to clear outside a basic e-transfer. A shared token system could let banks settle those transfers instantly and around the clock, with payments programmed to trigger automatically, such as releasing funds the moment a shipment clears customs. Customers likely wouldn't see any of this directly — it would just run in the background.
A separate track from the digital-dollar debate
This project is distinct from Canada's actual digital-dollar debate. The Bank of Canada ran a public consultation on a possible digital Canadian dollar in 2023 that drew almost ninety thousand responses, and 85% of respondents said they would not use a hypothetical digital Canadian dollar, with many citing privacy and continued access to cash. Canada has tried digital cash before: the Royal Canadian Mint sold off its MintChip pilot in 2016, and the app built on it shut down for good in 2018.
Banks hedge with stablecoins too
Scotiabank and TD are also among 21 banks backing a separate joint U.S. dollar stablecoin project, meaning the same institutions are betting on tokenized deposits and stablecoins at once. BMO, meanwhile, went live this year as the first bank on CME Group's tokenized cash platform on Google Cloud, letting institutional clients move U.S. dollars around the clock for margin and collateral.
In the United States, JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo are building a rival tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House, targeting a first-half 2027 launch largely to keep stablecoins from siphoning off deposits. Thirty-nine U.S. state banking associations have their own version too, the BankChain Alliance, aimed at community and regional lenders.
The six Canadian banks haven't set a launch date, and opening the system to other deposit-taking players remains a stated goal, not a commitment.
Source: Decrypt
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