Overview
- Parliament narrowly approved the federal budget on Monday evening, embedding a framework to regulate fiat-backed stablecoins under Bank of Canada supervision.
- The central bank will run a public registry of authorized issuers and oversee compliance with prudential, operational and disclosure standards.
- Issuers must hold one-to-one reserves in the reference currency or other high-quality liquid assets, keep backing in segregated accounts with qualified institutions such as banks or Tetra Trust, enable immediate redemptions and meet cybersecurity and failure-management requirements.
- Non-bank issuers are barred from paying any form of interest or yield to stablecoin holders under the budget language.
- The package broadens open banking to include business data and sets up a ban on screen scraping subject to regulations, while industry voices like Coinbase Canada call the move a step forward and seek interim market-entry paths for CAD stablecoins and reconsideration of the yield prohibition.