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"Recent advancements in decentralized finance (DeFi) have resulted in a rapid increase in the use of Automated Market Makers (AMMs) for creating decentralized exchanges (DEXs). In this paper, we organize these developments by treating an AMM as a neoclassical black-box characterized by the conversion of inputs (tokens) to outputs (prices). The conversion is governed by the technology of the AMM summarized by an 'exchange function'. Various types of AMMs are examined, including: Constant Product Market Makers; Constant Mean Market Makers; Constant Sum Market Makers; Hybrid Function Market Makers; and, Dynamic Automated Market Makers. The paper also looks at the impact of introducing concentrated liquidity in an AMM. Overall, the framework presented here provides an intuitive geometric representation of how an AMM operates, and a clear delineation of the similarities and differences across the various types of AMMs."

R3 published a report on the application of automated market makers (AMMs) to cross-border and cross-currency central bank digital currency (CBDC). AMM structures, which are are common in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, increase price transparency, work for low liquidity instruments, and bring the process of trading and settlement closer together. Such outcomes could benefit segments of today's FX market. However, adapting AMM to  spot FX markets will need to answer questions including: who would run it, what formula might be appropriate for larger transactions, and how to incentivize participants.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub, Banque de France, Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Swiss National Bank launched Project Mariana, to investigate the use of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols to automate FX trading and settlement. The project will explore the use of automated market makers (AMMs) for the cross-border exchange of hypothetical CHF, EUR and S$ wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC). AMM protocols combine smart contracts with pooled liquidity to price and transfer digital assets automatically.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is expanding into the world of interest rate swaps (IRS), a derivative instrument for exchanging fixed and variable interest rates, which account for more than $1 quadrillion in exchanged value per annum in traditional finance. DeFi firm Voltz Labs has launched a non-custodial automated market making (AMM) IRS trading platform based on the Aave and Compound DeFi USDT, USDC, DAI and ETH lending markets. However, IRS AMMs are challenged by DeFi markets' lack of fixed-rate products off which to price swaps. (Traditional markets offer both variable- and fixed-rate products.)

The OECD published a paper that provides evidence of increased concentration of decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity provision in decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and automated market makers (AMMs). A low trade count is observed in liquidity pools where DeFi liquidity provision is concentrated, with 20% of the pools of some of the DEXs examined accounting for more than 90% of the trading volume of these DEXs. Also, a small number of liquidity providers participating in the examined pools represent a significant part of the trading activity. This could exacerbate DeFi vulnerabilities, with possible impact on market functioning, price discovery, and competitive dynamics.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published the results of its Project Mariana proof of concept that demonstrated technical feasibility of automated market-makers (AMMs) for cross-border trading and settlement of wholesale central bank digital currencies (wCBDCs). It borrows ideas and concepts from decentralized finance (DeFi) and leverages a public blockchain to design and test a transnational 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 motivation behind Swaap v2 is to address the current challenges in the crypto market-making sector, which is split between centralized and opaque actors and transparent Automated Market Makers (AMMs) that yield negative returns for their Liquidity Providers (LPs). Swaap v2 brings the best of both worlds, offering an open, transparent, non-custodial, composable, secure, and adaptive solution."

"AMM and decentralized liquidity pools are the subject of ongoing exploration by central banks. There is great interest in adapting the control mechanisms created by DeFi for CBDC liquidity management. We show that this is possible with some refinement and careful design, though important questions remain to be considered."

Since Black Thursday, ETH is still performing well and organic demand for leverage has only increased. However, DAI selling from leverage seekers could not offset the yield farming craze and on average DAI has traded at around $1.02. Potentially, market making activities also decreased due to lucrative opportunities from yield farming. Importantly, this all happened despite heavily increased debt ceilings, the onboarding of new collateral assets and 0% rates across the board. The issue is that all the conventional monetary tools at hand simply cannot compete with massive DAI demand from yield farmers and new price mechanics introduced by several AMMs like Curve.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) launched Ubin+, an expanded collaboration with international partners on cross-border foreign exchange (FX) settlement using wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC).  Ubin+ will develop technical standards and infrastructure to support cross-border connectivity, interoperability and atomic settlement of digital currency transactions across platforms using distributed ledger technology (DLT), and non-DLT based financial market infrastructures. It will also evaluate the efficiency and risk implications of such platforms, and establish the related policy frameworks. (The BIS Innovation Hub led Project Mariana that is investigating the use of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and automated market makers (AMMs) to automate FX trading and settlement, is part of Ubin+.)

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published an interim report on Project Mariana, which investigates combining FX trading and settlement in cross-border transactions into a single instantaneous step using automated market makers (AMMs) and wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to eliminate credit and settlement risk. The project also examined cross-border interoperability using wholesale CBDC based on a uniform technical standard, as a way to future-proof CBDC developments. In addition, Mariana investigated asset mobility between different blockchain-based networks using bridges.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub Eurosystem Centre, a joint effort by the BIS and all Eurosystem central banks, opened on March 28, 2023. The Centre will have offices in Frankfurt and in Paris, hosted and supported by the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Banque de France. The European Central Bank will coordinate the interactions of the Eurosystem with the Centre. The Centre's project focus areas will be decentralized finance (DeFi), wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), cyber security and green finance. Projects include Atlas, which will create an open-source data platform to provide information on DeFi and crypto-asset market capitalization, economic activity and international flows of crypto-assets, and Mariana, which will explore automated market-makers (AMM) for the cross-border exchange of Swiss franc, euro and Singapore dollar wholesale CBDCs.

Can investors obtain better protection when crypto firms fail if activities migrate from centralized crypto entities to DeFi protocols? Decentralization provides some clear benefits to investors, by preventing misuse of customer funds and providing more transparency surrounding data and code. Governance procedures are also more transparent, though voting power can be highly concentrated and thus subject to manipulation. Moreover, the technology in DeFi allows different types of financial services to interact with few frictions. For instance, a flash loan allows users to simultaneously (or atomically) conduct and fund an arbitrage trade-something that would not be possible on a centralized platform. However, the technology also facilitates the creation of excessive leverage due to the repeated use of the same collateral for borrowing and lending. Further, bugs in smart contract codes, as well as hacks to oracles and smart contracts, resulted in an estimated loss of more than $1.3 billion in 2022:Q1. DeFi protocols may also introduce novel legal risks. In particular, the legal obligations of DeFi platforms are often opaque, and users may have little recourse should they seek to modify a transaction as the parties involved are anonymous and may be located anywhere in the world.