Saudi Arabia's central bank (SAMA) confirmed on September 20, 2026, that it has withdrawn from mBridge, the China-led cross-border wholesale CBDC settlement platform. SAMA stated it completed its proof of concept on May 13, 2025, and is "no longer a participating member." The exit follows the Ban...
"Many US allies viewed mBridge as economically useful to reduce dependence on the dollar-dominated system, but remained sensitive to US objections." — Eswar Prasad, Professor of Trade Policy, Cornell University & Brookings Institution
Saudi Arabia's central bank (SAMA) confirmed on September 20, 2026, that it has withdrawn from mBridge, the China-led cross-border wholesale CBDC settlement platform. SAMA stated it completed its proof of concept on May 13, 2025, and is "no longer a participating member." The exit follows the Bank for International Settlements' own departure in October 2024, leaving mBridge operating without any of its original Western-aligned institutional architects.
The withdrawal leaves four central banks — China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE — plus newly added Macao running a platform that has processed $55.49 billion in cumulative transaction volume, with an estimated 95% of settlement denominated in digital yuan. The move crystallizes a widening fault line in global payments infrastructure: Western-aligned nations are consolidating around the BIS-led Project Agorá, while China advances mBridge toward commercial deployment with CIPS integration. Cross-border settlement, once a technical backwater, has become a front line in financial geopolitics.
SAMA joined mBridge as an observing member in 2023 and upgraded to full participant in June 2024 to study wholesale CBDCs for cross-border commercial bank settlements. The central bank said the move was planned from inception.
"As planned, SAMA successfully completed its mBridge [proof of concept] on 13 May 2025. Following the completion of the PoC, SAMA is no longer a participating member," the central bank stated.
The timing aligns with broader geopolitical recalibration. Saudi Arabia maintains a riyal-dollar peg and depends on dollar-denominated oil revenues. Deeper integration into a platform where 95% of settlement flows through digital yuan presented strategic tension with Washington, which has been vocal about the risks of alternative settlement systems that could circumvent sanctions enforcement.
Daleep Singh, former White House deputy national security adviser, warned in 2025 that China could gain "considerable influence over standards governing privacy, security, interoperability and enforcement of US sanctions" through platforms like mBridge.
mBridge was launched in 2021 through the BIS Innovation Hub to address the structural inefficiencies of cross-border payments — slow settlement (3-5 business days via correspondent banking), high costs (2-7% of transaction value), and opacity in intermediary chains.
The platform uses distributed ledger technology to enable participating central banks to issue and exchange wholesale CBDCs directly, eliminating correspondent banking intermediaries. Key metrics through late 2025:
Macao went live in June 2026, with three local banks completing 23 cross-border transactions on the first day, covering trade settlement and remittances with mainland China, Hong Kong, and the UAE. The addition brings the membership to six entities, three of which are linked to China — reinforcing concerns about Beijing's outsized influence on platform governance and standards.
The BIS exited mBridge in October 2024 under politically charged circumstances. The departure followed a Bloomberg report that top bank officials discussed shutting down the project during a meeting in Washington. The discussions were prompted by Russian President Vladimir Putin floating the idea of a BRICS-led alternative payments system during the BRICS Summit in Kazan, with mBridge cited as a potential enabling technology.
BIS General Manager Agustín Carstens characterized the move as a graduation: the institution had "graduated out" of the project because participating central banks could continue independently. He stressed that mBridge "had not been created as a BRICS payment platform" and emphasized the need for payment systems to comply with international sanctions.
The diplomatic framing masked a harder reality. With the BIS gone, mBridge lost its multilateral institutional anchor — the entity that had provided technical governance, credibility with Western regulators, and a patina of geopolitical neutrality. Operations shifted to a Hong Kong-based entity controlled by the remaining central banks.
Josh Lipsky, Senior Director of the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center, noted that BIS's withdrawal signaled a division in CBDC development, with payment networks "increasingly reflecting geopolitical divides." He stated: "If there is even a possibility that Project mBridge could be helpful to those ambitions, the west wants no part of it."
The global cross-border CBDC landscape has fractured into competing architectures with no overlapping membership:
mBridge (China-led):
Project Agorá (BIS-led, Western-aligned):
The contrast is stark. mBridge is commercially operational with $55 billion processed; Agorá remains in early testing with sub-million-dollar pilot transactions. However, Agorá carries the institutional weight of G7-aligned central banks and the existing SWIFT infrastructure that moves 15.1 billion messages annually and connects 11,500+ institutions globally.
The USD held 50.99% of SWIFT payment value as of July 2026, according to Statista. mBridge's architecture is designed precisely to route around this dominance — a feature that makes it strategically valuable to Beijing and strategically threatening to Washington.
mBridge operates alongside China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which handles conventional RMB cross-border settlement. CIPS has grown substantially:
CIPS and mBridge serve complementary functions. CIPS handles conventional messaging-based settlement; mBridge provides DLT-based atomic settlement with wholesale CBDCs. Together, they form a two-layer alternative to the SWIFT/correspondent banking system — one that operates entirely outside Western financial infrastructure.
Reports indicate Chinese regulators have directed certain banks to use mBridge to bypass US sanctions, including entities in Xinjiang — a move that has drawn sharp criticism from Washington and contributed to the geopolitical pressure that preceded both the BIS and Saudi exits.
SAMA's departure from mBridge does not signal withdrawal from digital payment innovation. In January 2026, Jeel — the innovation arm of Riyad Bank, Saudi Arabia's third-largest bank — signed a memorandum of understanding with Ripple to explore cross-border payments, digital asset custody, and asset tokenization within a regulatory sandbox framework.
The arrangement supports Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia's long-term economic diversification strategy. While neither SAMA nor Jeel has officially linked the mBridge exit to the Ripple partnership, the sequencing suggests Saudi Arabia is redirecting its cross-border payment experimentation toward platforms that carry less geopolitical risk — particularly those compatible with US regulatory frameworks and dollar-based settlement.
The kingdom's position reflects a broader pattern among Gulf states. The UAE remains a mBridge participant but simultaneously engages with SWIFT and multiple blockchain-based settlement platforms. Hedging, rather than alignment, characterizes the region's approach to competing payment architectures.
The mBridge fragmentation has direct implications for the private stablecoin and blockchain settlement market, which is developing its own parallel cross-border rails:
The two-bloc CBDC structure may paradoxically benefit private stablecoin rails. Institutions operating across both geopolitical blocs need settlement infrastructure that works regardless of which CBDC network a counterparty uses. Dollar-denominated stablecoins on neutral blockchain infrastructure — Ethereum, Solana, or purpose-built chains like Circle's Arc — could fill that interoperability gap.
However, stablecoins currently represent only 0.02% of global payment volume, according to industry data. The gap between stablecoin settlement capability and actual market penetration remains vast.
The Saudi exit marks the end of mBridge's claim to geopolitical neutrality. What began as a BIS innovation project to fix broken cross-border plumbing has evolved into a China-centric settlement rail — one that processes real volume but operates without Western institutional buy-in. The platform's technical achievement is real: $55 billion settled on shared infrastructure at speeds that make correspondent banking look archaic. But technology alone does not determine adoption. Governance, compliance with sanctions regimes, and alignment with dollar-based trade flows matter at least as much.
The cross-border payment landscape now has two architectures, two governance models, and two geopolitical sponsors — with no bridge between them. For the $238 billion cross-border payments market, the question is no longer whether settlement infrastructure can be modernized. It is whether modernization will produce interoperability or fragmentation. The data, as of September 2026, points toward fragmentation.