Report: Bank for International Settlements and French, Swiss, and Singaporean central banks successfully tested cross-border wholesale CBDC trading using DeFi
The Bank for International Settlements alongside the central banks of France, Singapore and Switzerland tested out using wholesale CBDC to conduct cross border trading.
Context & Ripple Effects
This builds on a France–Switzerland cross-border digital-currency trial focused on wholesale, bank-to-bank activity, extending the policy question from bilateral payments to cross-border trading among more jurisdictions.
It also follows Banque de France’s earlier blockchain experiment with major French market participants, making the latest test part of a sustained effort to examine how central-bank money could operate in tokenized financial-market workflows.
First-order effects
- The BIS and the French, Swiss, and Singaporean central banks have practical test evidence that wholesale CBDC trading can be executed across borders using DeFi techniques; this remains a technical trial, not a production rollout.
- Participating central banks and their market counterparts can use the result to refine interoperability, settlement, and governance requirements for future wholesale-CBDC designs.
Second-order effects
- Other central banks and financial-market infrastructures face greater pressure to compare cross-border CBDC approaches with existing payment rails and tokenized-deposit models rather than evaluate domestic CBDCs in isolation.
- The result raises the value of shared technical and legal standards: a cross-border design is useful only if counterparties can connect systems while retaining control over settlement and oversight.
Third-order effects
- If repeated pilots move toward common implementation choices, wholesale digital money could develop as a cross-border market-infrastructure layer rather than as separate national experiments.
- The durable contest is likely to be over governance and interoperability: public-sector CBDCs, bank-issued tokenized money, and private-chain settlement systems may coexist unless one model proves easier to scale across jurisdictions.
The trend: Central-bank digital-currency work is shifting from domestic proofs of concept toward interoperable wholesale settlement experiments spanning multiple jurisdictions and market structures.