Hong Kong-UAE Digital Currency Project Volume Surges
Project mBridge, a multi-CBDC cross-border payments pilot between Hong Kong and the UAE, saw its transaction volume surge to over $55 billion in 2025. This represents a 2,500-fold increase over three years, demonstrating that cross-border instant payment infrastructure built with regulatory cooperation can achieve significant institutional and corporate usage. The two regions also deepened their financial links with a focus on digital assets.
- Project mBridge was initiated in 2021 by the BIS Innovation Hub and the central banks of Hong Kong, Thailand, China, and the UAE. It utilizes a custom-built distributed ledger, the mBridge Ledger, to facilitate real-time, peer-to-peer cross-border payments and foreign exchange transactions. Saudi Arabia joined as a full participant in June 2024. - The platform is designed to address key inefficiencies in traditional cross-border payments, such as high costs, low speed, and operational complexity, by bypassing the correspondent banking system. Transactions are settled directly between participating commercial banks in central bank-issued digital currencies, reducing settlement times to seconds. - A 2022 pilot involving 20 commercial banks from the four founding jurisdictions saw over 160 real-value transactions totaling more than $22 million conducted for corporate clients, primarily for trade settlement. - As of November 2025, over 95% of the transaction value on the mBridge platform was settled using China's digital yuan (e-CNY). This reflects the significant scale of the e-CNY's domestic deployment, which had processed over 3.4 billion transactions worth approximately $2.3 trillion by late 2025. - The project reached the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage in mid-2024, at which point the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) handed over operational management to the participating central banks. The platform is now considered live for government use. - In a February 2026 meeting, the Central Bank of the UAE and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, led by Governor Khaled Mohamed Balama and Chief Executive Eddie Yue respectively, agreed to deepen cooperation on digital assets, tokenization, and stablecoin regulation. - As part of the collaboration, the CBUAE formally joined Hong Kong's Central Moneymarkets Unit (CMU), a debt securities depository. This membership grants UAE investors direct access to Chinese mainland capital markets through Hong Kong's infrastructure. - Beyond the core participants, there are over 31 observing members for Project mBridge, including the central banks of Australia, Brazil, France, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's innovation center, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
