Canada's Six Biggest Banks Team Up on a Shared Digital-Dollar Network

In brief

• 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 banks themselves.
• The project is separate from the Bank of Canada's shelved digital-dollar consultation, where 85% of nearly 90,000 respondents said they would not use a hypothetical digital Canadian dollar.
• Scotiabank and TD are also among 21 banks building a joint U.S. dollar stablecoin, while BMO already runs a tokenized cash platform with CME Group and Google Cloud.

Canada's six biggest banks just 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. The first phase focuses on moving deposits between the banks themselves, not into consumer wallets.

A tokenized deposit is a regular bank deposit represented as a digital token on a shared ledger—same money, same bank, same rules, just using a different network. It is not a new cryptocurrency, and it is not a CBDC either.

The banks want the system “competitive and secure,” as they put it in their joint statement, 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.