Project mBridge vs Agorá: Two Rival Blueprints for Cross-Border CBDC

When a trading company in Hong Kong pays a supplier in Abu Dhabi, the money usually takes the long way round: through correspondent banks, often through US dollar accounts in New York, with cut-off times and fees at each stop. Project mBridge was built to cut that route down to a single hop between central bank currencies. Four years after its first big pilot, it works. The question is who wants to use it.

What mBridge is

mBridge is a shared ledger that lets commercial banks in different countries settle cross-border payments directly in wholesale central bank digital currencies. It was developed by the People's Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand and the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, with the Bank for International Settlements' Innovation Hub. The Saudi Central Bank joined as a full participant in June 2024.

Instead of a chain of banks passing messages and adjusting balances in turn, a payment on mBridge is a single transfer of digital central bank money on a common platform. Settlement is final once it happens. For a bank, that means less money tied up in foreign accounts and fewer reconciliation headaches.

A payment, step by step

Take a simplified example. A Thai electronics exporter is owed money by a buyer in Hong Kong. In the traditional route, the buyer's bank sends a payment message, the money moves through one or more correspondent banks, each converts or holds funds, and the exporter's bank credits the account a day or two later. Each step carries its own fee and its own risk of the payment getting stuck.

On mBridge, the buyer's bank holds digital Hong Kong dollars issued by the HKMA on the platform. It converts them to digital baht with a participating bank and transfers the baht directly to the exporter's bank. Both legs happen on the same ledger, so the exchange and the transfer settle together. Neither side is left exposed if the other leg fails.

That last point is technical but important. In finance it is called payment-versus-payment, and it removes one of the oldest risks in foreign exchange: paying out one currency and not receiving the other.

The numbers

Reuters, citing Atlantic Council data and reported by The Block, put cumulative mBridge value at about $55.5 billion in January 2026, roughly 2,500 times the level of 2022. The People's Bank of China gave its own figure of almost 500 billion yuan, about $74.4 billion, by the end of 2025, with more than 95% settled in e-CNY, according to China Daily. Chinese banks keep adding use cases. In July 2026, Industrial Bank processed a 500 million yuan cross-border transfer for an equity deal.

Those totals are meaningful for a young platform. They are also tiny next to the volumes that move through correspondent banking.

The departures

Two departures changed how mBridge is seen. In October 2024, the BIS announced it was graduating out of the project, saying the participating central banks could carry on independently. Many observers read it as the BIS stepping back from a platform that was increasingly dominated by one currency and that raised awkward sanctions questions.

Then in September 2026, the Financial Times reported, and Business Today followed, that the Saudi Central Bank had completed its proof of concept on 13 May 2025 and was no longer a member. Saudi officials framed it as the natural end of a trial rather than a rejection, and said the technical experience would feed into domestic payment work.

The result is a platform that keeps growing in volume but has become, in practice, a China-anchored network with Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE as the other core participants.

mBridge proved the technology. Agorá is trying to prove the politics.

Agorá: the other blueprint

While mBridge moved on without it, the BIS started a different project. Project Agorá brings together seven central banks, covering the UK, the US, the euro area through the Banque de France, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Switzerland, plus more than 40 financial institutions including Citi, HSBC, JPMorgan, BNP Paribas and Santander.

The design is different in one crucial way. Agorá does not put a new central bank currency in the middle. It places tokenised commercial bank deposits on one layer and tokenised central bank reserves on another, with each central bank running its own part. Results published in May 2026, summarised by Payment Expert, showed the prototype settling multi-currency payments in seconds once liquidity was locked, with sanctions, anti-money-laundering and fraud checks running at the same time rather than one after another. The next steps named include real-value transactions and governance for a possible production platform.

Comparing the two

What it means for people who send money

Neither platform touches consumers directly. A taxi driver in Abu Dhabi sending money to his family in Kozhikode will not open an mBridge app. But wholesale settlement is where much of the cost of a cross-border payment hides. Faster settlement between banks means less money parked in foreign accounts, fewer failed payments and, eventually, room for lower fees. We look at those costs in the cost of sending money home.

The bigger story is fragmentation. Cross-border payments may end up running on several networks shaped by geopolitics: mBridge for trade linked to China, Agorá-style tokenised deposits for the large Western banks, and instant payment links such as Project Nexus for retail. Stablecoins are competing in the gaps. Our view is that interoperability between these islands will matter more than which one wins.

For context on how central bank money differs from bank and stablecoin money, see our three-way comparison.

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