On Tuesday Macau officially went live on mBridge, the DLT-based cross border payment system that uses central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Eleven commercial banks have access, several of them being Macau branches of China’s largest banks, which are already connected via mainland China and Hong Kong. While mBridge is operational in Macau for cross border payments, the digital Macao pataca is still at the sandbox stage for domestic usage. That said, China’s digital yuan is a pilot that had processed the equivalent of $2 trillion in transactions by the end of last year.
mBridge was founded by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub, and the central banks of Thailand, Hong Kong, China and the UAE, although the BIS is no longer involved. mBridge entered the minimum viable product (MVP) phase two years ago, at which point Saudi Arabia announced plans to join, although it is not yet live. The UAE launched to much fanfare in November 2025. The addition of Macau brings the membership to six, with half of them linked to China, which developed the technology. In January China announced that mBridge had processed the equivalent of $55 billion in transactions, with more than 95% using the digital yuan. As we previously reported, that was largely because most transactions were between Hong Kong and China.
One commentator observed that mass adoption still required addressing a few issues, including regulatory coordination, liquidity and legal compliance. With the recent tests of another multi-CBDC platform, Agorá, we contrasted the design with mBridge. Many central banks may be reticent to trust the circulation of their CBDC on a third party platform such as mBridge. The Agorá design avoids this, enabling each central bank to control their own ledger.
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