Three Southeast Asian central banks — the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) — formalized a joint framework on October 23, 2026 to standardize cross-border settlement in tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins. The initiative, br...
"To fully harness the benefits of using digital money, collaboration among policymakers and industry participants will be needed to address practical issues around acceptance, settlement and interoperability." — Leong Sing Chiong, Deputy Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore
Three Southeast Asian central banks — the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) — formalized a joint framework on October 23, 2026 to standardize cross-border settlement in tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins. The initiative, branded BLOOM (Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency), now counts 24 industry participants including Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, J.P. Morgan, DBS, Standard Chartered, and the World Bank Group.
The announcement lands in a market where Asia-Pacific cross-border payment flows reached $13.5 trillion in 2025 and are projected to approach $23.8 trillion by 2032, according to FXC Intelligence data presented at Money20/20 Asia. Average remittance costs in East Asia and the Pacific remain at 5.83% for a $200 transfer, well above the G20's 3% target. BLOOM represents the region's bet that programmable digital money — not wholesale CBDCs — can compress those costs at scale.
The timing is notable. The BIS exited mBridge in October 2024, and Saudi Arabia subsequently departed the platform. Project Agorá, the BIS's replacement effort with seven G7-aligned central banks, serves a different geopolitical constituency. BLOOM occupies the gap: a regulator-led but private-sector-executed framework that sidesteps the CBDC sovereignty debates that stalled multilateral efforts.
BLOOM is not a blockchain. It is not a shared ledger, a common token, or a payment rail. It is a coordination framework: a set of agreed standards for how tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins issued in one jurisdiction can be accepted, exchanged, and settled in another.
MAS launched BLOOM in October 2025, building on five years of experimentation under Project Orchid, which explored a digital Singapore dollar starting in 2021. The October 23, 2026 expansion added BNM and BOT as "policymaker members," giving the initiative a three-country regulatory footprint covering a combined population of approximately 107 million people across Singapore (5.9M), Malaysia (34M), and Thailand (67M).
The distinction matters: BLOOM does not propose a shared stablecoin license, a common currency, or a central settlement layer. Each jurisdiction retains independent regulatory authority. According to Aznan Abdul Aziz, deputy governor of Bank Negara Malaysia, "A future where frictionless cross-border payments can be made using multiple digital monies is now closer to a tangible reality than a far-fetched fantasy."
BLOOM's 24 members span four categories:
Policymaker Members:
Global Banks:
Payment Networks & Fintech:
Digital Asset Infrastructure:
Multilateral:
The participant list is telling. It includes both traditional payment networks (Visa, Mastercard) and crypto-native infrastructure (Circle, Ripple, Anchorage Digital). Visa and Nium are already testing cross-border payments using regulated U.S. dollar and euro stablecoins outside conventional banking hours. Ripple ran an RLUSD trade finance pilot with Unloq examining XRP Ledger-based settlement.
No Chinese institution appears on the roster. This is consistent with BLOOM's positioning as a Southeast Asian alternative to the China-dominated mBridge platform, where 95% of settlement volume flows through the digital yuan.
BLOOM addresses the bilateral-agreement bottleneck. Today, every handoff between different digital money forms requires separate legal terms, technical integration, and compliance arrangements. A bank in Bangkok accepting a Singapore-dollar stablecoin from a Malaysian issuer must negotiate terms with each counterparty individually. This does not scale.
BLOOM organizes its work into three streams:
1. Acceptance and Settlement. Standardizing how institutions accept different forms of digital money and where transactions ultimately settle. This includes contracting templates, settlement procedures, and technical specifications for linking systems.
2. Interoperability. Defining how digital money arrangements running on different networks and infrastructure can communicate. Multiple tokenized deposit networks (DBS, OCBC, Maybank) and stablecoin rails (Circle, StraitsX) need a common message format and settlement protocol.
3. Programmable Controls. Embedding identity verification, sanctions screening, and transaction limits directly into digital money flows. This is the compliance layer — the feature that differentiates regulated digital money from peer-to-peer crypto transfers.
The core economic argument: standardized multilateral arrangements reduce the cost of each new bilateral link from a bespoke legal-technical-compliance integration to a plug-in connection. MAS states the aim is "to reduce the need for financial institutions to set up separate arrangements with each counterparty or market."
BLOOM's credibility rests partly on the domestic stablecoin programs running in parallel across all three jurisdictions.
Malaysia. Bank Negara Malaysia launched the Digital Asset Innovation Hub (DAIH) in June 2025. Over 30 ringgit-based stablecoin projects were submitted. Three were onboarded for live testing: ringgit stablecoins for B2B settlement by Standard Chartered and Capital A, tokenized deposits for payments by Maybank, and tokenized deposits for payments by CIMB. BNM intends to provide regulatory clarity on ringgit stablecoins and tokenized deposits by end-2026. Certain use cases will also explore Shariah-related considerations.
Thailand. The Bank of Thailand opened a public consultation on October 20, 2026 — three days before the BLOOM announcement — proposing regulatory principles for baht-denominated stablecoins. Key requirements include full 1:1 deposit backing by Thai baht reserves, a ban on interest payments by stablecoin issuers, and an initial phase limited to financial institutions for wholesale settlement only. BOT's Daranee Saeju indicated BLOOM would guide the country's regulatory approach to tokenized money, particularly for wholesale settlement and international payments.
Singapore. MAS's stablecoin regulatory framework has been in effect since August 2023, making it the most mature of the three. Circle's USDC and StraitsX's XSGD operate under this framework. Singapore's Partior — a J.P. Morgan, DBS, and Temasek joint venture — already processes institutional cross-border payments on blockchain rails.
The convergence is not accidental. All three jurisdictions are building domestic stablecoin infrastructure that BLOOM can then connect cross-border.
BLOOM enters a crowded field of cross-border payment initiatives. Its positioning relative to each reveals its strategic logic.
mBridge. The multi-CBDC platform connecting China's PBoC, HKMA, CBUAE, Bank of Thailand, and Bank of Mongolia processed $55 billion in cumulative cross-border settlements as of January 2026. The BIS exited in October 2024, citing project "graduation." Saudi Arabia subsequently departed. Digital yuan constitutes approximately 95% of settlement volume. Forbes characterized the outcome: "Multilateral CBDC interoperability is dead." BLOOM sidesteps this by working with private-sector stablecoins rather than sovereign CBDCs.
Project Agorá. The BIS's successor initiative brings seven G7-aligned central banks and over 40 private institutions (J.P. Morgan, Citi, HSBC, SWIFT). It focuses on tokenized commercial bank deposits settling against tokenized central bank reserves. No overlap in central bank membership with BLOOM. The two could theoretically interoperate, but no formal linkage exists.
Project Nexus. The BIS-supported initiative connecting instant payment systems (UPI, DuitNow, InstaPay, PayNow, PromptPay) across India, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. PayNet and NETS were appointed technical operator in February 2026; go-live is targeted for 2027. Nexus handles conventional fiat instant payments; BLOOM handles digital money. They address different layers of the same corridor.
Private Stablecoin Rails. Circle, Stripe, and other infrastructure providers already enable cross-border stablecoin transfers without bilateral agreements. Orchestration layers move stablecoins across 15+ chains. These private rails are faster to deploy but lack the regulatory endorsement that BLOOM provides. BLOOM's value proposition is making private stablecoin flows regulator-approved for institutional use.
The three BLOOM jurisdictions form one of Asia's densest trade networks:
Combined bilateral trade across the three corridors exceeds $200 billion annually. Even marginal efficiency gains in settlement — reducing costs from 5.83% to the G20's 3% target for remittances, or compressing settlement times for wholesale trade from T+2 to near-instant — represent billions in recovered value.
The FSB's cross-border payment roadmap for 2026 requires average wholesale transfer costs below 1% and end-to-end settlement under one hour for standard corridors. Current correspondent banking infrastructure does not consistently meet these benchmarks. According to Forbes, Asia-Pacific cross-border flows will approach $23.8 trillion by 2032 while "the correspondent-banking rails that settle them keep shrinking." BLOOM is one attempt to build replacement plumbing.
Several structural questions remain unanswered.
No common token. MAS explicitly named no specific token for BLOOM settlement. USDC is not authorized for domestic payments across all three jurisdictions. Ripple's RLUSD is not approved in Malaysia or Thailand. Each corridor may require different bridge assets, reintroducing fragmentation.
No shared license. Each central bank retains full regulatory sovereignty. A stablecoin approved in Singapore may not be accepted in Malaysia without separate BNM authorization. This preserves optionality but limits the speed of cross-border standardization.
No timeline. BLOOM has published no go-live date, no transaction volume targets, and no pilot completion milestones. The initiative remains in its framework-design phase after one year of operation.
Governance ambiguity. The relationship between the three policymaker members is described as collaborative but nonbinding. There is no treaty, no shared supervisory body, and no formal dispute resolution mechanism.
Currency risk. Settling in multiple local-currency stablecoins (SGD, MYR, THB) exposes participants to FX risk that dollar-denominated stablecoins avoid. The framework has not addressed whether atomic FX swaps or netting arrangements will be standardized.
Three Southeast Asian central banks (MAS, BNM, BOT) formalized BLOOM on October 23, 2026, creating a regulatory coordination framework for cross-border settlement in tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins across a $200B+ annual trade corridor.
BLOOM counts 24 participants spanning global banks (J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, DBS), payment networks (Visa, Mastercard), and crypto-native firms (Circle, Ripple, Anchorage Digital), plus the World Bank Group.
The initiative addresses the bilateral-agreement bottleneck: standardizing acceptance, interoperability, and programmable compliance controls across different digital money networks rather than building a shared ledger.
All three jurisdictions are simultaneously building domestic stablecoin infrastructure — Malaysia's DAIH sandbox (3 live pilots, 30+ submissions), Thailand's baht stablecoin consultation (opened October 20), and Singapore's existing regulatory framework.
BLOOM occupies a strategic gap between the China-dominated mBridge ($55B settled, 95% digital yuan) and the G7-aligned Project Agorá, positioning Southeast Asia's digital money infrastructure outside either bloc.
No go-live date, common token, shared license, or binding governance mechanism has been announced. The framework remains in its design phase.
BLOOM is a framework bet: the proposition that standardized rules for digital money acceptance, interoperability, and compliance can reduce cross-border friction more effectively than building another shared platform. The approach is deliberately modest — no common currency, no shared ledger, no sovereignty concessions. Whether modesty is a feature or a limitation depends on execution speed.
The initiative's competitive advantage is regulatory legitimacy. Private stablecoin rails are faster but lack institutional trust. mBridge has throughput but carries geopolitical baggage. Project Nexus connects fiat instant payment systems but not digital money. BLOOM sits at the intersection: regulated digital money, cross-border, multi-network, central-bank-endorsed.
The economic case is straightforward. Over $200 billion in annual bilateral trade flows through corridors where settlement costs remain above G20 targets and correspondent banking relationships continue to thin. Asia-Pacific cross-border flows are projected to nearly double to $23.8 trillion by 2032. The region that standardizes digital money settlement first captures a structural cost advantage.
Whether BLOOM delivers depends on factors outside any framework document: whether Malaysia finalizes ringgit stablecoin rules by end-2026 as planned, whether Thailand's consultation produces workable regulations, and whether 24 industry participants can agree on technical standards faster than bilateral deals proliferate without them. The framework exists. The infrastructure is building. The timeline remains undefined.