🎉Exciting news! The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and central banks of France, Singapore, and Switzerland have successfully completed Project Mariana, a new CBDC initiative! 🌐 This project tested cross-border trading and settlement of wholesale central bank digital currencies (wCBDCs) between financial institutions using DeFi technology on a public blockchain. 🚀

🌉 The collaboration focused on creating standardized technical tokens and bridges for seamless wCBDC transfers. They also explored the Automated Market Maker (AMM) concept for automatic pricing and execution of spot FX transactions. 🤖

🔮 Project Mariana's architecture balances central banks' domestic need for oversight and financial institutions' interest in efficient wCBDC transfers. However, this is just an experimental phase, and BIS plans to investigate further opportunities and challenges tied to CBDC and its associated technologies. 🧐

📈 Building on last year's success, BIS collaborated with central banks from Hong Kong SAR, Thailand, mainland China, and the United Arab Emirates to complete a cross-border digital currency pilot. More experiments and trials will continue, but this marks significant strides towards using blockchain for settlements! 🌟