mBridge at $55 Billion: The Multi-CBDC Rail Reshaping MENA Payment Corridors

In October 2022, a small group of central banks processed 160 transactions totalling $22 million on a shared blockchain platform. Three years later, that same platform—Project mBridge—had cleared 4,047 transactions worth $55.49 billion. That is not a rounding error or a projection. That is a system quietly becoming the most consequential payments infrastructure built since the SWIFT network, and two GCC central banks are already inside it.

I have spent most of my career in payments infrastructure—building QR rails across MENA, working through the CBUAE's regulatory architecture, watching how cross-border settlement actually happens versus how people imagine it happens. When I look at mBridge, I do not see a theoretical experiment. I see a wholesale settlement rail that has cleared real value at scale, with real central bank backing, across corridors that matter directly to this region. The conversation in MENA boardrooms has not caught up with the speed of what is being built.

This piece is my attempt to close that gap.

What is Project mBridge?

Project mBridge is a multi-central bank digital currency platform originally incubated under the BIS Innovation Hub in 2022. It allows participating central banks to issue their own central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) onto a shared, permissioned blockchain infrastructure—and to settle cross-border transactions directly between those ledgers, without the correspondent banking chains that currently make international transfers slow, expensive, and opaque.

The platform reached what BIS termed its "minimum viable product" stage in June 2024, and in October 2024 the BIS formally transferred governance to the participating central banks themselves. As of today, five central banks sit at the table: the People's Bank of China (PBOC), the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates (CBUAE), and—having joined in a move that significantly expanded the platform's geographic and geopolitical footprint—the Saudi Central Bank, known as SAMA.

The mechanism is genuinely novel. Rather than routing through a series of correspondent relationships—each bank maintaining accounts with the next, each hop adding a fee and a delay—mBridge allows each participating central bank to issue its own digital currency directly onto the shared ledger. A payment instruction from a Thai commercial bank to a UAE counterpart can settle in minutes, atomically, with no pre-funded nostro account required at either end.

For anyone who has spent time in treasury operations or correspondent banking, the operational significance of that sentence is difficult to overstate.

The Numbers Behind the Platform

Let me put the scale in concrete terms, because the contrast matters.

As of November 2025, Project mBridge has processed 4,047 transactions totalling $55.49 billion in settlement volume. That figure comes from PYMNTS, citing Atlantic Council research published in January 2026. The original October 2022 pilot—160 transactions totalling $22 million—has compounded into something more than two thousand times larger in transaction value within three years. No pilot-to-production story in payments infrastructure that I am aware of has run at that trajectory.

There is one number that demands equal attention: China's e-CNY comprises more than 95% of total settlement volume on the platform—a detail that has drawn significant geopolitical scrutiny from Washington and from Western financial institutions. The platform's architecture is neutral. The usage pattern is not. That asymmetry is the central tension in the mBridge story, and I will come to it shortly.

The transaction composition matters too. Early volumes were dominated by energy and commodities settlement—the China-Gulf corridor in particular. The UAE Ministry of Finance and the Dubai Department of Finance executed a government financial transaction using the wholesale digital dirham on the mBridge platform in November 2025. This marked the first recorded instance of the UAE sovereign using the mBridge rail for a government payment—a data point that will almost certainly be cited in every boardroom presentation about digital government finance in the GCC for the next two years.

How the Mechanics Actually Work

Understanding mBridge requires setting aside the common misconception that CBDCs are simply "digital cash." Wholesale CBDCs—the kind at play on mBridge—are not consumer-facing instruments. They are central bank money issued in digital form for use between financial institutions and central banks. Think of them as the reserve balances that commercial banks already hold at their central bank, but programmable, auditable at the transaction level, and—critically—interoperable across borders through a shared ledger.

The mBridge platform uses a purpose-built blockchain called mBridge Ledger, which BIS described as a high-performance distributed ledger capable of supporting atomic cross-border delivery-versus-payment. "Atomic" settlement means both legs of a transaction—the debit and the credit—either succeed together or fail together. There is no period of exposure where one party has paid but the other has not yet received. In correspondent banking today, that exposure window can stretch to days.

Each central bank on the platform issues its own CBDC and maintains sovereignty over that issuance. The platform does not create a single supranational digital currency—a common misunderstanding. The e-CNY, the digital dirham, the digital baht, and the Saudi CBDC remain distinct instruments under distinct central bank control. The platform simply provides the settlement infrastructure that allows those instruments to exchange value directly, with each central bank acting as the bridge liquidity provider for its own currency.

This architecture matters because it means existing monetary sovereignty frameworks do not need to be dismantled to participate. A GCC central bank joining mBridge retains full control over its digital currency supply, its access policies, and its compliance requirements. The interoperability is in the rails, not in the regulation.

The Geopolitical Dimension

I am not going to pretend the geopolitical dimension of mBridge does not exist. It is real, it is material, and it is something that every MENA payment strategist needs to have a considered position on.

Alisha Chhangani, associate director at the Atlantic Council, described the dynamic precisely in January 2026: "Rather than seeking to displace the dollar outright, China is building parallel settlement rails that reduce reliance on dollar-based systems." That framing—parallel rails, not replacement—is analytically correct, and it is the frame that allows GCC participants to assess the platform on its infrastructure merits rather than treating participation as an ideological declaration.

There are legitimate concerns. The e-CNY's dominance of settlement volume—above 95% as of November 2025—means that the platform's clearing capacity is currently weighted heavily toward Chinese payment flows. A Forbes analysis from May 2026 raised questions about whether that concentration had made sustainable multilateral CBDC interoperability more difficult, not less. There are also documented concerns from Western regulators about the potential for the platform to provide alternative settlement channels that reduce the reach of sanctions imposed through dollar-denominated correspondent networks.

These concerns are not fabricated. But they also need to be weighed against a concrete infrastructure reality: the existing correspondent banking architecture serving the GCC has documented inefficiencies in cross-border settlement that cost businesses real money. The question for UAE and Saudi policymakers—and the businesses that depend on those corridors—is not "mBridge or SWIFT?" That is a false binary. The question is: what settlement infrastructure mix serves the Gulf's economic interests across all its trading relationships?

The BIS's decision to transfer governance to the participating central banks in October 2024 was, in part, a response to this tension. By stepping back from operational oversight, BIS gave the platform's central bank members the ability to shape its development directly—including its compliance architecture, its access policies, and its governance frameworks. Saudi Arabia's decision to join after that transfer is a data point worth noting carefully.

The MENA Angle: What UAE and Saudi Participation Actually Means

For MENA, the significance of mBridge is not abstract. It is embedded in the specific trade corridors that define the Gulf economy.

The UAE-China trade relationship is one of the largest in the Arab world. Hydrocarbons, real estate investment, logistics, and consumer goods flow through this corridor at scale. Each transaction in that corridor currently touches at least one correspondent banking chain, often two. The friction is real: settlement delays, currency conversion costs, and the compliance overhead of a multi-bank chain. mBridge offers, for the first time, a technically viable path to direct central-bank-to-central-bank settlement for this corridor's wholesale flows.

Saudi Arabia's participation changes the geometry again. SAMA's presence on the platform means that the two largest GCC economies are now inside a multilateral CBDC framework that spans from the Gulf to East Asia. The Saudi Vision 2030 financial modernisation agenda has included digital payments infrastructure as a priority—Project Aber, the Saudi-UAE bilateral CBDC proof of concept, ran as far back as 2019 and established technical feasibility for exactly this kind of bilateral digital settlement. mBridge extends that logic to a multilateral setting.

For the UAE in particular, the digital dirham project—of which the wholesale digital dirham on mBridge is a component—has moved from exploration to execution. The November 2025 government transaction is evidence of a cleared, operational integration rather than a pending one. The Central Bank of the UAE has been among the more methodical central banks in the world in its approach to digital currency architecture: clear on use cases, cautious on consumer-facing rollout, deliberate on correspondent integration. The mBridge participation reflects that approach. It is a wholesale-first, infrastructure-first strategy, which is the right order of sequencing.

What Businesses and Regulators Should Do Now

If you are running treasury, payments strategy, or regulatory affairs for a financial institution with GCC operations, here is what I think the mBridge trajectory requires from you in the next twelve months.

Map your correspondent chain. Every cross-border payment you make through the UAE-China, UAE-Thailand, or Saudi Arabia-China corridor runs through at least one correspondent relationship with fees, delays, and operational risk. Build an honest map of where that chain currently sits, what it costs in aggregate annually, and where the settlement risk concentrations are. That map is the baseline against which mBridge—or any future multilateral CBDC rail—will be evaluated.

Engage your central bank counterpart early. The CBUAE and SAMA are both active participants in mBridge governance. Commercial banks in both markets have an opportunity to input into the access frameworks, the compliance architecture, and the phasing of commercial access layers. That window for input will not remain open indefinitely. The banks and institutions that engage with the design phase will be better positioned than those that wait for the product to be finalised.

Separate the geopolitics from the infrastructure evaluation. Your risk committee will ask about sanctions exposure and US Treasury posture on mBridge. These are legitimate questions. They should be answered specifically—based on your institution's counterparty profile, your settlement currency mix, and your regulatory relationships—not generically. The platform's architecture is neutral; your institution's risk profile is specific. Do not conflate the two in your assessment.

Build the compliance layer in advance. One consistent observation from institutions that have engaged most successfully with new payment rails is that the ones who succeed treat compliance infrastructure as a prerequisite, not an afterthought. If mBridge commercial access opens in 2027 or 2028, the institutions ready to move quickly will be the ones whose know-your-customer, transaction monitoring, and sanctions screening frameworks have been designed to accommodate atomic cross-border settlement. That work takes longer than it looks from the outside.

My Perspective: The Infrastructure Debate is Already Over

The fintech conversation in much of the world is still framing mBridge as a proposal—something being considered, debated, assessed. That framing is approximately two years out of date.

Project mBridge has cleared $55.49 billion. It has live central bank participants from the two largest GCC economies. It has executed a UAE government transaction. The BIS has transferred governance. This is not a proof of concept. It is a minimum viable product with a clear upgrade path, owned by the central banks that matter most to this region's trade corridors.

I spent years building payment rails in markets that initially had no infrastructure to build on—starting from the customer need and working backward to the settlement mechanics. The lesson from that work is that the institutions that engage with infrastructure when it is still being designed have fundamentally different optionality than those who engage when the design is finished. mBridge is still being designed in the ways that matter for commercial access: governance, compliance frameworks, and the layering of retail services on top of wholesale rails.

The question for MENA payment leaders is not whether mBridge matters. It clearly does. The question is whether your institution is positioned to shape what it becomes, or positioned only to react to what it becomes without you. Those are two very different places to be standing when the commercial access window opens.

I will be covering the mBridge governance developments, the digital dirham architecture, and the GCC CBDC policy landscape in detail through my weekly column. If you are working through the strategic implications of CBDC infrastructure for a MENA financial institution, I welcome the conversation.