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.
Mastercard and Visa are extending stablecoin technology into the systems that settle card payments between financial institutions, while leaving the consumer checkout experience largely unchanged. Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in August 2026 and has expanded its network’s settlement options to include regulated stablecoins. Visa, meanwhile, is working with Stripe-owned Bridge and Lead Bank on on-chain settlement for card programs. The shift became more concrete in September, when SoFi Bank moved its credit and debit card issuing portfolio to live settlement using its bank-issued SoFiUSD. That portfolio represents more than $25 billion in annualized card volume, a measure distinct from the value settled in stablecoins. Visa separately reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate exceeding $25 billion in October. The networks’ initiatives target the back-end movement and reconciliation of funds, including periods when traditional bank settlement rails are unavailable; they do not require merchants to accept cryptocurrency.
The European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a bridge connecting tokenised-asset platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for wholesale settlement in central bank money. The arrangement enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement, in which an asset and its payment move together. It does not yet make wholesale settlement available around the clock: Pontes depends on T2 operating hours and requires tokenised central bank money balances to be defunded at the end of the day. ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone says the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes operating hours substantially by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá has tested cross-border payments using a shared programmable ledger that brings tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves into a single settlement process. Both initiatives address delays and liquidity demands in wholesale payments, but neither makes continuous, cross-border settlement available today.
Project Agorá’s real-value testing settled 30 live, multi-currency transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000, with atomic settlement averaging about 80 seconds. The tests involved 28 commercial institutions and five central banks. The result shows how tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves could support faster cross-border settlement, though it does not establish that settlement latency has been eliminated. The project’s prototype found that tokenisation did not change the legal character or regulatory obligations of deposits and reserves. Its design also let participating institutions conduct compliance checks concurrently. Seven more commercial banks joined in September 2026, taking private-sector participation to nearly 50 institutions. At Sibos in October, banking executives described the testing pipeline as a step towards production trials alongside the European Central Bank’s Pontes platform. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not participate in the live test transactions, an important qualification for the US dollar tests.
Ripple’s final federal trust bank charter, a Moody’s investment-grade rating for RLUSD and a planned expansion of the stablecoin’s availability on Coinbase have strengthened its position as a regulated digital dollar. Coinbase said Global Exchange access, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow its initial retail and prime rollout. Moody’s assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade rating it has given a stablecoin. The distinctions behind those developments matter. Ripple National Trust Bank manages RLUSD’s reserve collateral, but the legal issuer remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated Ripple subsidiary. The national trust bank is uninsured and cannot take commercial retail deposits or extend credit. Moody’s also noted that holders do not currently own the underlying reserves directly and that statutory bankruptcy protections depend on implementation of the GENIUS Act, whose rules take effect in January 2027.
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.