Project mBridge

Project mBridge reached the minimum viable product (MVP) stage in mid-2024. The project aimed to explore a multi-central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform shared among participating central banks and commercial banks, built on distributed ledger technology (DLT) to enable instant cross-border payments and settlement.

Project mBridge was the result of extensive collaboration starting in 2021 between the BIS Innovation Hub, the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, the Digital Currency Institute of the People's Bank of China and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. The Saudi Central Bank joined in 2024.

The project aimed to tackle some of the key inefficiencies in cross-border payments, including high costs, low speed and operational complexities. It also addressed financial inclusion concerns, particularly in jurisdictions where correspondent banking (which connects countries to the global financial system) has been in retreat, causing additional costs and delays. Multi-CBDC arrangements that connect different jurisdictions in a single common technical infrastructure offer significant potential to improve the current system and allow cross-border payments to be immediate, cheap and universally accessible with final settlement.

A platform based on a new blockchain – the mBridge Ledger – was built to support real-time, peer-to-peer, cross-border payments and foreign exchange transactions. In 2022, a pilot with real-value transactions was conducted. The mBridge project team then explored whether the prototype platform could evolve to become an MVP.

To achieve this, the four founding participant central banks and monetary authorities each deployed a validating node, while commercial banks conducted more real-value transactions in preparation for the MVP release. In tandem, the project steering committee created a bespoke governance and legal framework, including a rulebook, tailored to match the platform's unique decentralised nature.

The MVP platform is enabled to undertake real-value transactions (subject to jurisdictional preparedness) and is also compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. This allowed it to be a testbed for add-on technology solutions, new use cases and interoperability with other platforms. The BIS announced in October 2024 that it was handing the project over to the partners.