mBridge volume hits $55B as BIS pivots to Western rival

The Receipt

China’s bid to rewire global finance just posted its first major scoreboard victory. Project mBridge, the cross-border CBDC platform piloted by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) and partners, has processed over $55.5 billion in cumulative volume, according to data from the Atlantic Council cited by Reuters. The figure represents a 2,500-fold surge since 2022, signaling that the platform has moved well beyond the sandbox phase.

The numbers reveal a lopsided reality: the digital yuan (e-CNY) accounted for roughly 95% of settlement volume. While the platform theoretically supports a multi-currency corridor between China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, it is currently functioning as a high-speed rail for the renminbi.

The Institutional Split

This volume explosion comes months after a quiet but critical fracture in central bank diplomacy. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the “central bank for central banks,” exited mBridge in October 2024. The departure was widely interpreted as a geopolitical hedge, with the BIS pivoting its resources to Project Agorá, a rival initiative focused on tokenizing deposits across Western commercial banks.

The divergence creates two distinct tracks for the future of sovereign settlement:

• Track A (mBridge): Live, China-led, utilizing CBDCs for immediate atomic settlement.
• Track B (Agorá): Western-aligned, focused on commercial bank money, still in early testing phases as of early 2026.

Domestic Velocity

The cross-border volume is spillover from a massive domestic ramp-up. The PBOC’s latest figures show the e-CNY processed 3.4 billion transactions worth approximately $2.4 trillion recently, an 800% year-over-year increase. This domestic velocity provides the liquidity depth required to support mBridge’s institutional flows.

“Project mBridge is unlikely to challenge dollar dominance directly, but it may incrementally erode it,” noted the Atlantic Council, highlighting the platform’s role in energy and commodity trades that bypass the correspondent banking network.

Why It Matters

For crypto natives, mBridge is the “permissioned nemesis.” It validates the efficiency of distributed ledger technology (DLT) for settlement, cutting transaction times from days to seconds, but centralizes the consensus. As mBridge scales, the window for neutral, decentralized stablecoins (like USDC or USDT) to become the default settlement layer for global trade narrows in jurisdictions friendly to the Belt and Road Initiative.