Malaysia and Thailand Central Banks Join MAS’s BLOOM for Cross-Border Digital Money Settlement Tests
Oct. 24, 2026 • Article • Digital Assets
The Monetary Authority of Singapore has added Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand as policymaker members of BLOOM, its initiative for cross-border settlement using tokenized commercial bank deposits and regulated stablecoins. Announced on October 23, 2026, the expansion also brings in nine industry and multilateral participants, including Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, Maybank and the World Bank Group.
BLOOM is working on whether digital money can be accepted and settled across jurisdictions, move between different ledger networks and carry programmable compliance controls. Those questions are particularly relevant where foreign exchange rules restrict convertibility or offshore holdings. Bank Negara Malaysia is separately running three domestic wholesale pilots involving ringgit stablecoins and tokenized deposits and expects to issue guidance by late 2026. Existing work includes a Maybank cross-border ringgit-to-Singapore-dollar transaction and a Ripple test of conditional trade finance payments. Neither establishes that BLOOM has resolved the regulatory and technical barriers to broader cross-border settlement.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has brought Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) into its BLOOM initiative as policymaker members, widening the central-bank involvement in work on cross-border digital money settlement. Announced on October 23, 2026, the move puts the three authorities alongside participants testing how tokenized commercial bank deposits and regulated stablecoins could be used across currencies and jurisdictions.
MAS also announced nine new industry and multilateral participants: Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, Maybank, Airwallex, Monee, Nium, ShopeePay and the World Bank Group. Their addition broadens the range of organizations involved in BLOOM, but the available information does not establish that a common cross-border settlement system is already operating. Reports give conflicting totals for the initiative’s overall membership, so a definitive participant count is unclear.
What BLOOM is testing
BLOOM is organized around three workstreams: jurisdictional acceptance and settlement, interoperability between distinct ledger networks, and programmable controls. Together, they address the problem of making digital money usable across borders while respecting the rules of each jurisdiction through which a transaction passes.
The initiative focuses on tokenized commercial bank deposits and regulated stablecoins across G10 and Asian currencies. Tokenized deposits represent commercial bank deposit money on a digital ledger; stablecoins are a separate form of digital money. BLOOM is not a plan to issue one unified retail central bank digital currency. Its focus is on whether different forms of digital money can be used for settlement across existing jurisdictional boundaries.
Interoperability matters because a payment made on one ledger may need to reach a recipient using another. BLOOM’s programmable-controls workstream addresses a related regulatory question: how to apply local requirements when a transaction crosses borders. The planned controls include identity verification, smart-contract sanctions screening and transaction limits set by jurisdiction. The aim is to embed those checks into digital money tokens rather than rely on separate bilateral integration deals for each connection.
Those workstreams describe the issues BLOOM is tackling, not a finding that all participating networks or instruments already work together. Acceptance, technical connectivity and compliance each have to be considered for cross-border settlement; bringing more policymakers into the initiative gives the work a wider regulatory setting.
Why Malaysian and Thai participation matters
Malaysia and Thailand bring distinct foreign exchange requirements to BLOOM’s cross-border work. Malaysia’s Foreign Exchange Policy rules and Thailand’s foreign exchange regulations impose restrictions on onshore convertibility and offshore holdings. Reconciling those requirements with multi-currency digital money is one of the practical challenges facing settlement between Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore.
Their participation as policymakers is also distinct from industry involvement. Thailand’s Kasikornbank was already participating in BLOOM as an industry member before BOT joined as a central-bank policymaker member. The change adds Thai regulatory representation; it should not be read as the start of all Thai participation in the initiative.
BNM has related work under way at home. It confirmed that three separate domestic wholesale pilots involving ringgit stablecoins and tokenized deposits began in February 2026. The central bank expects to publish formalized regulatory guidance for both instruments by late 2026. Those are domestic pilots, not evidence that Malaysia has approved their unrestricted use for cross-border settlement.
Existing transactions and next steps
Industry activity offers examples of the payment processes BLOOM is examining, although the projects have different scopes. Maybank Singapore previously completed a real-time on-chain Malaysian ringgit-to-Singapore-dollar foreign exchange conversion and cross-border settlement for Yinson Holdings Berhad under BNM’s Digital Asset Innovation Hub. That transaction demonstrates a specific conversion and settlement, rather than resolving the broader question of how different jurisdictions and ledgers can work together.
Within BLOOM, Ripple is testing its RLUSD stablecoin on the XRP Ledger with supply-chain platform Unloq. The test concerns automated, conditional cross-border trade finance payments. Its emphasis on payment conditions connects to BLOOM’s work on programmable controls, but the research does not report an outcome for the test.
MAS established BLOOM in October 2025 as a commercial, multi-currency successor to Project Orchid. That earlier project spent four years testing Purpose-Bound Money and programmable Singapore-dollar infrastructure. BLOOM shifts the focus toward settlement involving multiple currencies and types of digital money.
The immediate development is therefore an expansion of policymaker and participant involvement, not the launch of a single regional currency or a finished settlement network. BNM’s expected guidance and BLOOM’s work on acceptance, interoperability and compliance remain relevant next steps as the participants examine how regulated digital money might operate across borders.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.
ACI Worldwide and Circle announced a pilot on October 27, 2026, involving USDC and connectivity to Colombia’s Bre-B instant payments system. The integration runs through ACI Connetic, a payments orchestration platform, rather than embedding USDC in Bre-B’s central infrastructure. There is no indication that Colombia’s central bank has adopted USDC as a settlement asset for the national network. The distinction matters because ACI also supplies technology for Bre-B’s central directory and real-time clearing engine. Bre-B launched in October 2025 and handled more than 500 million transactions within five months. Connetic is designed to bring traditional payment rails and digital asset networks together without requiring banks to replace legacy core ledgers. ACI says the platform can support other digital assets and liquidity providers, so the pilot does not make USDC its exclusive option. The arrangement tests a vendor-level connection alongside an established public payment system, not a change to that system’s settlement rules.
Ripple received final approval on 26 October 2026 for Ripple National Trust Bank, giving it a federally chartered institution for fiduciary and custody activities. The charter does not authorize commercial deposits or loans, and it does not transfer issuance of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin to the new bank. RLUSD issuance remains with Standard Custody & Trust Company under New York State Department of Financial Services supervision. BNY is the primary custodian of the dollar deposits and U.S. Treasury reserves backing the stablecoin. The arrangement separates a federal custody role from state-supervised issuance. It also comes as the OCC implements the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin rules and faces a lawsuit from the Independent Community Bankers of America challenging its authority to grant national trust charters to crypto firms. Ripple has separately announced an expanded partnership with BNY and Robinhood focused on institutional custody capabilities and exploring tokenized trade finance.
Stripe confirmed in October 2026 that it plans to expand its Bridge- and Visa-powered stablecoin card issuing program from 18 initial countries to more than 100 by the end of the year. The planned rollout spans Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. It follows Stripe’s February 2025 acquisition of Bridge, whose APIs connect stablecoin transfers with fiat accounts and bank payouts. Stripe has also made Open USD available to businesses in Stripe Financial Accounts alongside USDC. Its broader stablecoin infrastructure combines Bridge’s conversion tools with Stripe’s existing payment and treasury network and embedded wallets from Privy. Lead Bank supports the card program as a financial institution partner and BIN sponsor. A separate deployment by Ramp uses Bridge APIs and Privy wallets to let businesses pay vendors in stablecoins using funds from fiat bank accounts. Together, the developments show how Stripe is assembling stablecoin services for business payments, while the planned geographic expansion remains unfinished.
Project Agorá settled approximately CHF 800,000 in live, multi-currency transactions during a July 2026 testing phase. The work examined a cross-border payment model that places tokenised commercial bank deposits on a shared ledger while holding tokenised central bank reserves on jurisdictional ledgers. Five central banks participated directly in live-reserve settlement, although the project’s wider central-bank group has since expanded to eight with the Bank of Canada’s entry. The project reports an average settlement time of 80 seconds across six currencies and uses smart contracts to run anti-money laundering, sanctions and fraud checks simultaneously. Legal analyses found that tokenisation did not change the underlying character of deposits or reserves in participating jurisdictions. The findings support further work on deposit-based wholesale settlement, but the supplied research does not establish that the approach outperforms stablecoins. The Eurosystem plans to draw on Agorá’s architecture for Projects Pontes and Appia.