All six of Canada’s largest banks, Bank of Montreal, CIBC, National Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank and TD, said on Tuesday that they will jointly test a shared Canadian-dollar tokenised deposit system. The first phase will focus on moving tokenised deposits between member banks, with a longer-term aim of connecting to other digital asset initiatives. The banks said they expect other deposit-taking institutions to join at an appropriate time.
A tokenised deposit is an ordinary bank deposit represented on a digital ledger, not a separate crypto asset. Canada’s banking regulator, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, said in a 10 September statement that tokenised deposits are not legally distinct from conventional ones, which settled one of the obvious legal questions before the banks announced anything. Coinbase Canada chief executive Eric Richmond welcomed the project.
The logic is familiar from bank consortia elsewhere. If customers are going to expect programmable, always-on money, incumbents would rather provide it through deposits they already hold than watch balances drift into privately issued stablecoins. In a market where six banks hold most of the country’s deposits, acting together also avoids a race in which one lender builds a network that the other five then have to join on its terms.
What the joint statement leaves out is almost everything operational. No blockchain has been chosen, no technical architecture or timetable has been published, and no bank has committed to offering a tokenised deposit to its customers. Phase one is interbank plumbing. Whether ordinary Canadians ever hold one of these tokens depends on a decision the six have so far declined to make.
