Project mBridge

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the Bank of Thailand started the work as Inthanon-LionRock, a joint test of one platform for payments between their two jurisdictions. In February 2021 the Digital Currency Institute of the People's Bank of China and the Central Bank of the UAE joined, and the project continued as the Multiple CBDC Bridge under the BIS Innovation Hub in Hong Kong. The prototype of that year completed international transfers and currency exchange in seconds instead of several days, and the project report of September 2021 put the possible cost saving for users at up to half.

In a six-week pilot in 2022, 20 commercial banks from the four jurisdictions moved real money over the platform. The central banks issued the equivalent of US$12.1 million in e-HKD, e-CNY, e-AED and e-THB onto the ledger, and the banks settled 164 payment and foreign exchange transactions worth more than US$22 million. Many banks still paid from foreign currency balances they already held in their nostro accounts, so the built-in currency exchange saw few trades during the pilot.

Each participating central bank runs a validating node of the mBridge Ledger, and the nodes agree on new transactions with HotStuff+, a variant of the HotStuff consensus protocol for permissioned networks. Only central banks issue and redeem CBDC on the platform, so a commercial bank asks its own central bank to turn reserves into digital currency and back. The central bank also decides which domestic banks it admits, which currencies they may hold and in which amounts, as the BIS report on the pilot describes.

Banks on the ledger can send payments in any currency on the platform and can exchange two currencies as payment versus payment, in which both legs settle together or not at all. In the example of the BIS report, a company in the UAE pays a company in mainland China in e-CNY through their two banks on the platform. The minimum viable product announced in June 2024 is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and private firms were invited to propose services that connect to it.

In October 2024 the BIS announced that it would hand mBridge over to its partners, and the BIS Innovation Hub now counts the project among its concluded work. Agustín Carstens, General Manager of the BIS at the time, said in Madrid that the BIS was leaving the project "not because it was a failure and not because of political considerations", as Fintech News Singapore reported. He added that mBridge is "not the BRICS bridge" and that products of the BIS should not become a conduit for evading sanctions.

The BIS continued its work on cross-border payments with Project Agorá, in which eight central banks and more than 40 financial institutions test tokenized deposits and tokenized central bank reserves on one platform. Agorá builds on the unified ledger concept of the BIS and keeps commercial bank money on the platform, while mBridge carries only money issued by central banks.

The Saudi Central Bank joined as a full participant in June 2024, when more than 26 central banks and international organizations followed the project as observers. The Saudi Central Bank told the Financial Times that it completed its proof of concept on 13 May 2025 and has not been a participating member since, as Cointelegraph reported in September 2026. The Monetary Authority of Macao became a full member in 2026, and 11 Macao banks received approval to transact on the platform from 2 June 2026.

The Hong Kong government told the Legislative Council in October 2025 that mBridge has become part of the financial market infrastructure of the city, and banks there set their own fees for the service. Data of the Atlantic Council, reported by Reuters in January 2026, counted more than 4,000 cross-border transactions with a cumulative value of about US$55.5 billion. The digital yuan made up an estimated 95 percent of that volume.

No central bank of the euro area takes part in mBridge as a member. The European Central Bank, Banque de France, Banca d'Italia, Banque centrale du Luxembourg, Norges Bank and Magyar Nemzeti Bank are among the 31 observers that the BIS listed for the project in October 2024, next to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The Eurosystem follows its own route to settlement in central bank money on new ledgers. After its wholesale CBDC trials, Pontes connects DLT platforms to TARGET Services, and the longer-term Appia track asks whether one shared network or several connected ones should carry wholesale payments. For people and companies, the Eurosystem is preparing the digital euro, one of several CBDC projects in Europe.

mBridge is a multi-CBDC platform on which central banks issue wholesale digital currencies so that commercial banks in different jurisdictions can pay each other and exchange currencies directly. Project mBridge was a CBDC project of the BIS Innovation Hub from 2021 to 2024 and is now run by the participating central banks.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand, the Digital Currency Institute of the People's Bank of China and the Central Bank of the UAE built the platform with the BIS Innovation Hub. Eddie Yue, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, wrote in October 2025 that mBridge links the e-HKD with the digital currencies of mainland China, Thailand and the UAE. The Monetary Authority of Macao joined as a full member in 2026, while the Saudi Central Bank ended its participation in May 2025.

The Saudi Central Bank described its exit as planned: it joined to run a proof of concept, completed it on 13 May 2025 and then ended its participation. The statement became public in September 2026 through the Financial Times, as Trade Finance Global summarized, more than a year after the end of the test.

No, mBridge is a platform of individual central banks and not a project of the BRICS group of countries. BRICS Pay is a separate proposal of the BRICS Business Council, and both appear among the SWIFT alternatives next to CIPS and SPFS.

No, the mBridge Ledger is a permissioned blockchain that the participating central banks built for the project, and the only money on it is CBDC issued by those central banks. XRP and other public cryptocurrencies have no role in this design, in which only the central bank nodes validate transactions.