If Canada Won’t Build Its Own Rails, Who Will?, Didier Lavallee, Tetra Digital Group

What we talked about.

In this episode of The Sunny Ray Show, host Sunny Ray talks with Didier Lavallee of Tetra Digital Group about building financial infrastructure for Canada's digital asset economy. Lavallee explains how Tetra began as a regulated trust company after failures like FTX exposed Canadians to custody risk, and how it has spent five years working with leading institutions to safeguard crypto. He details Tetra's move into stablecoins, issuing a CAD pegged token that launched in May and quickly became one of the highest volume stablecoins in Canada. Drawing on 15 years in traditional finance, including trading desks, FX, and custody, Lavallee argues that legacy financial rails are outdated and centralized, and that stablecoins can modernize payments, remittances, and cross border transfers. He describes how a consortium including Wealthsimple, Shopify, and Shakepay approached Tetra to build a non securities stablecoin, and why banks still treat tokenization mostly as pilot projects. The conversation closes on Canada's growing remittance market and Tetra's upcoming retail and business activations aimed at making Canadian stablecoins genuinely usable.

Tetra Digital Group's Didier Lavallee explains why Canada needs its own regulated stablecoin, not borrowed US dollar rails, to modernize payments and remittances.

The questions, and the answers.

What problem are you solving at Tetra Digital Group?

Tetra started as a regulated trust company because Canadians were exposed to failures like FTX, and we wanted a proper regulated framework for crypto custody. We've done that for over five years with leading institutions. For about a year we've also been a stablecoin issuer, with our CAD stablecoin live since May and consistently seeing some of the highest volumes of any stablecoin platform in Canada.

You came out of traditional financial services. What convinced you digital assets would change how money moves, not just how it trades?

I was a trading desk person, then did public equities and FX, where I first noticed digital assets at conferences around 2016 and 2017. I later moved into custody of traditional assets and saw how centralized and outdated that infrastructure really was. When the chance came to join Tetra, I wanted to help modernize the system rather than keep working inside one that clearly didn't work well.

Why did building trust between digital assets and the traditional financial system turn out to be the harder problem?

Not your keys, not your crypto works for individuals, but institutions can't manage private keys at scale. You need a trusted custodial layer, which companies like BNY Mellon have provided for over a century. At Tetra we built that bridge so custodied assets legally remain the client's, not ours, applying a framework that already works in traditional finance to digital assets.

What did you get wrong in the early days that you'd warn a founder about today?

We assumed that if we built the custody product, the whole market would just come to us. Many platforms had already launched using US custody before we existed, so we still had to go earn trust and reputation. Getting early clients like 3iQ, whose leadership wanted to work with a regulated Canadian digital asset partner, was what really got us started.

Why does Canada need its own stablecoin instead of simply using US dollar rails?

In Canada, issuing a stablecoin without wrapping it as a security has basically been impossible, which limits it to trading use cases like moving in and out of Bitcoin. That's not exciting to me. What excites me is modernizing payments, cross border transfers, and agentic commerce, and the existing construct just didn't support that, so we took a different approach with our partners.

Banks, a broker, and consumer fintechs all backed the round. What did each of them have to believe before they'd write the check?

This wasn't Tetra's idea. A consortium approached us, including companies like Wealthsimple, Shopify, and Shakepay, who already transacted in digital assets, were forced to rely on USD stablecoins for regulatory reasons, and saw efficiencies a stablecoin could unlock, but not by taking on FX risk from a US denominated coin. As the Canadian dollar's importance grew, they saw an opportunity for a globally competitive product.

Who inside a Canadian bank has to say yes before this becomes ordinary plumbing rather than an experiment?

So many people. You need the risk and AML teams comfortable, then leadership and the executive committee to believe in it, plus you need to build internal capability to actually touch the technology. Our financial infrastructure runs on systems that are decades old, so bridging that into a blockchain environment is hard, which is why most banks are still running small proofs of concept.

Looking at the next 90 days, what has to be true for you to call it a good quarter?

We're working on some exciting activations Canadians will be able to see and use soon, on both the retail and business side. One in five Canadians sends money home, and most remittance options today are expensive and opaque. We want applications, potentially even inside people's banking experience, that let them send money abroad in a few clicks using our stablecoin.