Seven central banks and over 40 financial institutions are now running active blockchain-based sovereign debt experiments. In the span of four months — from late 2025 through March 2026 — the Bank of Canada completed a CAD $100 million tokenized bond pilot, the UK appointed HSBC to run its first ...
"Project Samara shows how the public sector and industry can collaborate to advance payment ecosystem innovation while understanding real-world benefits and challenges." — Ron Morrow, Bank of Canada
Seven central banks and over 40 financial institutions are now running active blockchain-based sovereign debt experiments. In the span of four months — from late 2025 through March 2026 — the Bank of Canada completed a CAD $100 million tokenized bond pilot, the UK appointed HSBC to run its first digital gilt trial, and the European Central Bank confirmed a Q3 2026 launch date for Pontes, its wholesale DLT settlement system. The Bank for International Settlements' Project Agorá, involving seven central banks and 43 private-sector firms, entered its next testing phase in early 2026.
This is no longer theoretical. Sovereign issuers — the entities with the least incentive to experiment — are moving their own debt onto distributed ledgers. The question is no longer whether government bonds will be tokenized but how fast incumbent infrastructure will yield to the new plumbing.
The tokenized U.S. Treasury market alone grew from under $2 billion in mid-2024 to approximately $9 billion by late 2025, a 350% increase in 18 months. BlackRock's BUIDL fund holds over $2.8 billion in tokenized Treasuries. The private sector has already proven the model works. Central banks are now catching up.
The Bank of Canada, alongside Export Development Canada (EDC), RBC Capital Markets, RBC Investor Services, and TD Bank Group, completed Project Samara on March 5, 2026. The experiment involved issuing Canada's first tokenized bond — a CAD $100 million, sub-three-month instrument — settled in wholesale central bank deposits on Hyperledger Fabric.
The Samara Platform handled the complete bond lifecycle: issuance, bidding, coupon payments, redemption, and secondary trading — all on a single distributed ledger. Settlement occurred instantly, with integrated bond and cash ledgers eliminating the traditional T+2 settlement lag.
The Bank of Canada reported operational efficiency gains, improved data integrity, and reduced counterparty and settlement risk. However, those benefits were "partially offset" by increased system complexity, liquidity costs, and gaps in the current regulatory framework.
Scott Moore, EDC's head, called it "a significant milestone demonstrating how tokenization and distributed ledger technology can enhance financial instrument efficiency and security." Jim Byrd of RBC Capital Markets noted the project achieved "real-time settlement and reimagining how market participants interact with fixed-income markets."
Project Samara builds on the Bank of Canada's earlier Jasper project, launched in 2016 with Payments Canada to test distributed ledgers for wholesale interbank payments. A decade later, the conclusion remains consistent: technically viable, commercially uncertain.
The Bank of Canada explicitly warned that "broader adoption will likely be slow due to integration challenges and limited appetite for core infrastructure changes." Canada separately shelved its retail CBDC initiative in its 2025 federal budget, choosing to focus on wholesale applications instead.
In February 2026, Britain appointed HSBC and law firm Ashurst to lead its first digital gilt trial, operating within the Bank of England's regulatory sandbox. If completed, the UK would become the first G7 nation to issue sovereign debt on blockchain infrastructure.
HSBC brings substantial credibility. Its proprietary Orion blockchain system has orchestrated over $3.5 billion in digital bond issuances globally, including Hong Kong's $1.3 billion green bond — one of the largest tokenized debt sales on record. The Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po has since stated the jurisdiction will "regularize the issuance of tokenized green bonds."
The UK pilot aims to reduce settlement time and lower operational costs for market participants. However, industry observers note that even a successful trial will require new legislation and clarified tax treatment before digital gilts become a standard instrument in UK debt markets.
The timing is not accidental. Britain's post-Brexit financial services strategy has leaned heavily on positioning London as a global fintech hub. A functioning tokenized gilt market would give the UK a structural advantage over Continental European competitors still in the pilot phase.
The European Central Bank confirmed in December 2025 that Pontes — its blockchain-based wholesale settlement system — will launch by Q3 2026. The system will connect distributed ledger platforms with the Eurosystem's TARGET services, enabling the flow of cash, securities, and collateral using central bank money on DLT.
The demand signal was immediate. Within months of the announcement, 64 stakeholders expressed interest in participating. Pontes builds on over 50 DLT trials conducted in 2024 involving 64 participants, which demonstrated reductions in counterparty risk, process automation via smart contracts, and improved transparency in wholesale transactions.
The ECB is running a dual-track strategy. Pontes provides the short-term solution for 2026. A second platform, Appia, is scheduled for early 2028, representing the ECB's long-term infrastructure ambition.
Separately, Banque de France and Euroclear announced Project Pythagore to tokenize Negotiable European Commercial Paper (NEU CP), adding another layer to the Eurozone's DLT buildout. Luxembourg issued its first Digital Treasury Certificates using DLT in June 2025 — the largest Treasury Certificates issuance to date on a distributed ledger.
The Bank for International Settlements is running Project Agorá to explore how tokenized commercial bank deposits can integrate with wholesale CBDCs on a unified platform for cross-border payments. Seven central banks — including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and central banks from Europe, Korea, Mexico, Japan, Switzerland, and the UK — are participating alongside 43 private-sector institutions.
The project entered its next testing phase in early 2026, with results expected in the first half of the year. Agorá's objective is to design a system that is faster, more transparent, and more accessible than the current correspondent banking model, which typically involves multiple intermediaries, 3-5 day settlement times, and fees that can reach 6% for small transfers.
The BIS Annual Economic Report 2025 outlined a blueprint combining tokenized central bank reserves, tokenized commercial bank money, and tokenized government bonds on a unified ledger — what BIS Managing Director Agustín Carstens has called the "Finternet."
If Agorá succeeds, it would render a significant portion of the current correspondent banking infrastructure obsolete. The implications for SWIFT, which processes over $5 trillion in daily cross-border payments, are direct.
The Swiss National Bank is ahead of every other central bank. In June 2024, it executed a live monetary policy operation using distributed ledger technology — issuing CHF 64 million in 7-day digital SNB bills settled in tokenized reserves on the SIX Digital Exchange platform.
This was not a sandbox. Not a pilot. A live monetary policy operation. The SNB used its own tokenized reserves as the settlement asset, establishing a precedent that no other central bank has matched.
Switzerland's advantage stems from its regulatory architecture. The SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) has operated as a fully regulated, DLT-based exchange and central securities depository since 2021, providing the infrastructure that other jurisdictions are still building.
While central banks run controlled experiments, the private sector has built a $9 billion tokenized Treasury market in 18 months:
The overall tokenized U.S. Treasury market grew from under $100 million in early 2023 to over $9 billion by late 2025 — a 50x expansion in under three years, according to data tracked by RWA.xyz.
These products now serve as margin collateral, DeFi building blocks, and stablecoin alternatives. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Circle offer on-chain T-bills that provide 4-5% yields backed by the U.S. government, competing directly with traditional money market funds.
The gap between private-sector scale and central bank caution is the defining tension of 2026. Private issuers have tokenized nearly $10 billion in government debt. Central banks have tokenized $164 million (Switzerland's CHF 64 million plus Canada's CAD $100 million).
Every central bank pilot to date has reached the same conclusion: the technology works, but the institutional plumbing is not ready.
Benefits confirmed across pilots:
Obstacles acknowledged:
The Bank of Canada's warning — "broader adoption will likely be slow" — echoes the Swiss National Bank's assessment from 2024 and the ECB's measured language around Pontes. Central bankers are not known for speed, and they are saying as much.
The tension between technical feasibility and institutional inertia is not new. But the number of concurrent experiments — Canada, UK, ECB, BIS, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, France — suggests the political will has shifted. The question is no longer whether to tokenize sovereign debt but how to manage the transition without disrupting existing markets.
The pattern across all six jurisdictions is identical: run a controlled experiment, confirm that settlement is faster and counterparty risk is lower, then issue a cautious statement about slow adoption. Central banks are building conviction through repetition, not revolution.
The private sector's $9 billion head start creates a structural dynamic. If BlackRock and Franklin Templeton can tokenize U.S. Treasuries at scale without central bank infrastructure, the value proposition for central bank-led systems becomes narrower — focused on settlement finality and monetary policy transmission rather than market access.
The BIS "Finternet" vision — a unified ledger combining tokenized reserves, commercial bank money, and government bonds — remains the most ambitious articulation of where this leads. But the gap between BIS blueprints and operational reality is measured in regulatory rewrites, legacy system decommissions, and the institutional politics of central banking. 2026 is the year the experiments became too numerous to dismiss. It is not yet the year the infrastructure changed.