Tetra Trust Company has launched CADD, the first Canadian-dollar stablecoin issued by a regulated financial institution in Canada, with the token approved by the Alberta Treasury Board and Finance. The supporting evidence appears in filed.
The Calgary-based firm describes CADD as a fully reserved digital currency designed for institutional settlement, eliminating the batch-processing delays that have defined Canadian financial infrastructure for decades.
The launch is backed by a heavyweight consortium that includes Shopify, National Bank of Canada, Wealthsimple, Shakepay, ATB Financial, Purpose Unlimited, and Urbana Corporation, which holds a majority stake in Tetra Trust. That same group contributed to a $10 million funding round the company closed in September 2025, and is now collectively supporting the token’s public rollout.
A Regulated Answer to a Gap in Canadian Finance
Canada currently clears roughly $424 billion per business day through legacy payment rails that still depend on batch infrastructure first deployed in the 1980s, according to Tetra Trust.
That aging architecture runs in fixed settlement windows, meaning corporate treasury transfers, cross-border payments, and fintech-to-fintech settlements are all constrained by business hours and correspondent banking delays.
CADD is designed to replace that friction entirely. The token is live on Base, Ethereum, and Tempo, with Solana integration planned for a later phase.
Reserves are held in trust under Canadian law and dedicated solely to redemption, according to the company’s disclosures, giving institutional users a clear regulatory foundation that USD-denominated stablecoins operating in Canada have never been able to provide.
The absence of a domestic regulated option had left Canadian businesses with few viable choices. USD stablecoins like Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC dominate the global market, but they introduce currency risk for Canadian entities settling in domestic dollars.
The global stablecoin market cap now stands at $320 billion, with USD-pegged tokens accounting for the vast majority of that figure, according to data from DeFiLlama. Global stablecoin transaction volume surpassed $27 trillion in 2025, exceeding Visa’s annual payment volume for the same period.
For Tetra, the timing is deliberate. The stablecoin sector has scaled aggressively in recent years, yet Canada lacked a meaningful, regulated domestic alternative.
The firm positioned CADD to fill that gap across four primary institutional use cases: 24/7 cross-border settlement, real-time corporate treasury transfers, programmable marketplace payouts, and direct fintech-to-fintech settlement without correspondent bank intermediaries.
Testnet to Mainnet: A Trail Already Blazed Between Major Institutions
Tetra did not arrive at launch day without proof of concept. In December 2025, the company ran testnet transactions between Wealthsimple and National Bank of Canada using the CADD token.
The company described that transfer as the first time a Canadian stablecoin moved between two licensed financial institutions, a milestone that provided technical validation before the mainnet launch.
That pilot also demonstrated regulatory comfort from two of Canada’s most recognizable financial names. National Bank of Canada is one of the country’s six largest banks by assets.
Wealthsimple has become one of Canada’s most prominent retail investment platforms. Their joint participation in the testnet phase gave Tetra’s launch a degree of institutional credibility that most stablecoin projects take years to establish.
The competitive landscape in Canada is beginning to show signs of life. Stablecorp, backed by Coinbase Ventures, previously filed a prospectus for its QCAD stablecoin under the Canadian Securities Administrators’ interim regulatory framework, as outlined in its prospectus filing. Other projects have also explored the regulated CAD stablecoin space, but none had achieved the combination of regulatory approval, multi-institutional backing, and live mainnet availability that Tetra now claims.
What separates CADD in practical terms is the regulatory wrapper and the breadth of its consortium. Having Shopify involved signals that programmable commerce payments are a genuine target use case, not a theoretical one.
Shopify processed hundreds of billions of dollars in merchant volume globally in recent years, and integrating real-time, programmable CAD settlement into its merchant ecosystem could represent a concrete near-term application for the token.
For the broader Canadian fintech and crypto sector, CADD’s launch signals a structural shift in how digital assets interact with regulated finance in the country. The U.S.
has pushed stablecoin legislation through Congress in recent months, and other jurisdictions including the EU have advanced their own frameworks. Canada now has its first live, regulated, CAD-native stablecoin sitting on major public blockchains, with institutional partners already committed to using it.
Whether CADD achieves meaningful transaction volume beyond the founding consortium will depend on adoption by the broader Canadian corporate and fintech community, and whether Tetra can expand its blockchain presence to Solana and potentially other networks without diluting its compliance posture.
For now, the infrastructure is live, the approvals are in place, and the backing reflects a level of institutional seriousness that the Canadian stablecoin sector has not seen before.
Not Financial Advice: This article is for informational purposes only. Crypto investments are highly volatile. Always do your own research.
