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 as part of their Amplify program — a specialized internship where you're paired into small teams to design and build a solution for a real business challenge. We got to do it all: from understanding the problem space, interviewing stakeholders across the bank, to ideating on solutions, designing, developing, deploying, and presenting our work to senior leaders.

My team built a blockchain-based foreign exchange tool that explores how RBC could offer foreign exchange between tokenized deposits in the (near) future. As a developer, I was hands-on with coding smart contracts on Ethereum (something I never would have pictured myself doing!), and I learned so, so much about foreign exchange and the world of digital assets, stablecoins, and blockchain.

At the start of May, we were presented with a problem statement by RBC's digital asset innovation team:

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 and decisions.

Every avenue we explored raised its own open question, and the list kept growing the deeper we dug:

Disclaimer·This project is under NDA, so I can't share our designs and details of our solution.

We designed, built, and deployed our now-patent-pending solution, pitching our product to RBC's C-suite executives and winning first place out of all Amplify teams!