Dr. Steve Drew meets Canada's stablecoin builders at Solana Summit Canada 2026

TORONTO. Canada’s digital dollar may not come from the Bank of Canada at all. At Solana Summit Canada 2026 in Toronto on Wednesday, two Canadian teams building stablecoins pegged to the loonie were on the floor making their case, and DENOS Lab director Dr. Steve Drew of the University of Calgary was there to hear it.

The summit drew developers, founders, investors, and researchers working on the Solana blockchain to a packed hall under a red backdrop crowned with the CN Tower. Talks on stage ran through payments, tokenized assets, and the tools that let software move money on its own, while much of the real business happened in the hallways between sessions.

One of those conversations was with Kevin Zhang and the team at Loon, who are developing CADC, the Canadian Dollar Coin, a digital token designed to hold its value one to one with the Canadian dollar. A second was with Felipe Priuli of Tetra, which is developing its own Canadian dollar stablecoin, CADD. Both builders are familiar faces to the lab. Zhang and Priuli spoke at the IEEE Stablecoin and Agentic AI Forum that DENOS Lab organized in Calgary in July, and Toronto was a chance to pick up where those talks left off.

The timing matters. Stablecoins in circulation today are overwhelmingly tied to the U.S. dollar, and Canadian businesses and consumers who use them take on currency risk with every transaction. A token backed by Canadian dollars would let payments, payroll, and cross-border trade settle on a blockchain in minutes without leaving the loonie, as Ottawa moves to bring fiat-backed stablecoins under a federal framework.

Drew also met Marc Lijour of the IEEE Blockchain Technical Community, which brings together engineers and researchers working on distributed ledgers across IEEE. The two talked about ways to connect Canadian industry and academic work on digital assets with the wider IEEE community, building on the partnership behind the July forum in Calgary.

For DENOS Lab the interest goes beyond the tokens themselves. The lab studies distributed learning, agentic simulation and reasoning, and a growing share of that work asks what happens when autonomous AI agents begin to hold and spend money, how they can be trusted to transact on someone’s behalf, and how the systems underneath stay secure when no single party is in charge. A stable, regulated Canadian dollar on a public blockchain is the kind of rail those agents would run on.