China’s mBridge CBDC Platform Clears $55B as BIS Exits the Room

The China-led mBridge platform has processed over $55.5 billion in cross-border wholesale CBDC transactions, according to Atlantic Council data released this week. The figure represents a 2,500-fold surge since the project’s pilot phase in 2022, signaling that Beijing’s alternative settlement rails have moved from experimental sandbox to operational reality.

The Numbers: A One-Horse Race

While mBridge technically supports a multi-currency corridor, connecting central banks in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, the flow is almost entirely unilateral. The digital yuan (e-CNY) accounts for approximately 95% of total settlement volume.

This dominance aligns with domestic metrics. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) reported that e-CNY processed 3.4 billion transactions worth $2.4 trillion internally in 2025. The shift is functional, not just numerical: commercial banks recently began paying interest on e-CNY holdings, effectively reclassifying the token from a cash equivalent to a yield-bearing deposit currency.

“Project mBridge is unlikely to challenge dollar dominance directly, but it may incrementally erode it.”
, Alisha Chhangani, Atlantic Council

The Institutional Split

The volume spike comes just months after the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) quietly walked away. In late 2024, the BIS graduated out of the project, with General Manager Agustín Carstens emphasizing that “mBridge is not the BRICS bridge.”

The departure marks a clear geopolitical bifurcation in banking infrastructure. While Beijing scales mBridge for the Global South and energy corridors (Saudi/UAE), Western central banks have pivoted to Project Agorá, a tokenized deposit initiative involving the Federal Reserve, ECB, and Bank of Japan. The rails are no longer theoretical; they are live, and they are separate.