Project Mariana: cross-border exchange of wholesale CBDCs using automated market-makers

Foreign exchange (FX) is the largest financial market in the world, trading about $7.5 trillion a day. Project Mariana explores how the future of FX trading and settlement could look in a world where central banks have issued central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and financial market infrastructures include elements of decentralised finance (DeFi).

The Mariana proof of concept demonstrates technical feasibility of so-called automated market-makers (AMMs) for cross-border trading and settlement of hypothetical Swiss franc, euro and Singapore dollar wholesale CBDCs (wCBDCs). It borrows ideas and concepts from DeFi and leverages a public blockchain to design and test a transnational FX interbank market using wCBDCs.

Project Mariana is a collaboration between the BIS Innovation Hub, the Bank of France, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Swiss National Bank. The project is purely experimental and does not indicate that any of the involved central banks intend to issue CBDC or endorse DeFi or a particular technological solution.