Episode #198: Loonie On-Chain: Canada’s Digital Dollar with Didier Lavallée

Hey everyone,Didier Lavallée is the CEO of Tetra Digital Group, the Canadian regulated trust company that issues CAD Digital (CADD), a Canadian dollar stablecoin that launched in May. I caught up with him remotely to discuss why Canada took so long to get a usable domestic stablecoin and what changes now that it has one.We have spent a lot of time on this show covering non-USD stablecoins in Latin America, where the pitch is usually an escape hatch from a weak local currency.Canada is a different case, and the argument for CADD rests instead on settlement speed, cross-border trade flows, and who owns the infrastructure that moves Canadian money at a moment when the relationship with Washington is under strain.🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversationBits & Borders is Presented by SumsubSumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub’s internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub’s customer base.Some of the key global highlights include:* Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).* Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.* Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.Key Takeaways:* Tetra was built in the wake of the QuadrigaCX collapse, which cost Canadian users roughly CAD 230 million and pushed regulators to require third-party custody. Rather than raise a company and launch a token, Tetra leaned on its existing license as a regulated trust company to become the issuer of CADD.* Every prior Canadian stablecoin attempt was prospectus-led, meaning anyone who touched the asset had to register with regulators. Didier argues that structure is why none of those projects reached scale, and that Canada’s provincial system compounds the problem, since a financial institution can face close to 20 regulatory bodies to bring a product to market.* CADD launched with partners that were already using dollar stablecoins because no usable Canadian equivalent existed, including Wealthsimple, Shopify, National Bank, Purpose, Shakepay and ATB Financial.* The demand Didier did not anticipate is domestic. Canada still lacks real-time payment rails, putting it behind its G7 peers, and the domestic system does not run nights, weekends or holidays. That gap is pushing sophisticated treasury desks toward programmatic settlement, including the card pre-funding model announced recently by Wealthsimple and Visa.* The cross-border case is more familiar. One in five Canadians sends money abroad, roughly 80% of Canadian businesses buy or sell into the US, and funding a US account can still take up to five days.* Canada is about 2% of global GDP but roughly 6% of the global FX market, which Didier sees as an opening for CADD in global treasury allocation. The catch is yield. No central bank holds a stablecoin it cannot earn on, and Canada’s draft Stablecoin Act is restrictive on that point, with the big banks pushing tokenized deposits instead.I enjoyed this conversation with Didier and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/didier-lavalle