Royal Bank of Canada
Blockchain-based foreign exchange
Role
Software engineer
+ designer
Timeline
May - Aug 2026
Team
1 business analyst
1 data engineer
1 software engineer
Skills
User research
Product strategy
Systems design
Software engineering
Overview
My team designed, built, and deployed a blockchain-based foreign exchange platform in 4 months, winning a $20,000 grant!
Summer 2026, I interned at RBC through their Amplify program, where teams of 3-4 interns are paired to design and build a solution to a real business challenge within the bank.
I worked with RBC's Digital Asset Innovation team. Over a few months, the team went from understanding the challenge to designing, building, and presenting our solution to senior leaders across the bank.
Outcomes
$302M
projected 5 year revenue
2 days→10 sec
decrease in trade settlement time
Patent-pending
We worked with lawyers to patent our solution
Problem
At the start of May, we were presented with a problem statement by RBC's digital asset innovation team:
Journey
We started by interviewing traders and clients while studying the current state of foreign exchange and blockchain technology.
Recent news related to blockchain, stablecoin, and decentralized finance.
Our solutioning led us to explore several different routes, each raising its own open questions the deeper we dug.
Disclaimer·This project is under NDA, so I can't share our designs and the details of our solution.
Results
We pitched our patent-pending solution to RBC's C-suite executives, winning first place out of 19 Amplify teams!
it's done! what did i learn?
Clarity > Consensus
Across a bank as large as RBC, we got wildly different feedback depending on who we talked to, and a few stakeholders pushed back on our idea outright. I learned that in a real-world project, your idea will always meet resistance and conflicting direction from every side. Rather than satisfying everyone, I learned to sift for the insights that move the solution forward.
Compliance is a design input.
Before, I believed that compliance was a final check after the design process. I learned that it had to be an input from day one. In fact, compliance shaped our entire solution! We designed for the compliance officer as a real user in the flow, creating a dedicated view where every transaction is auditable straight from the chain.
Same system, different audiences
We initially wanted to show the blockchain mechanics in our client portal— the revenue split, the chain it settled through. But customers don't need to see how trust is verified, they just need to trust it. What we exposed to compliance as proof, we abstracted away for the customer into a transaction that looks like anything they've used today.
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