China’s mBridge CBDC network surpasses $55B as alternative cross‑border rail
A China-led central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform is rapidly emerging as one of the most significant experiments in reshaping global payments. The multi-CBDC project known as mBridge has now processed more than $55 billion in cross-border transactions, underscoring how quickly non-dollar payment infrastructures are gaining traction.
According to figures compiled by the Atlantic Council, the mBridge platform has settled over 4,000 international transfers with a combined value of about $55.5 billion. Compared with the early testing phase in 2022, that represents an explosion in activity — roughly a 2,500-fold increase in just a few years, signaling that what began as a contained pilot is edging toward real-world scale.
mBridge is being trialed by several central banks across Asia and the Middle East. Participating authorities currently include mainland China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. While the platform is designed as a shared infrastructure that can host multiple CBDCs, China’s digital yuan — the e-CNY — dominates usage. Estimates suggest that roughly 95% of settlement volume on mBridge is denominated in the e-CNY.
The network’s growth closely tracks China’s broader push to build out its domestic digital currency ecosystem. Recent data from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) shows that the e-CNY has already been used in more than 3.4 billion transactions, with a cumulative value of around 16.7 trillion yuan, or about $2.4 trillion. That figure marks an increase of over 800% compared with 2023, highlighting how quickly the digital yuan is being embedded into everyday economic activity.
In parallel with this expansion, China’s central bank is in the process of retooling the design and role of the digital yuan. A new regulatory and technical framework will allow commercial banks to pay interest on balances held in e-CNY wallets. This is a significant shift away from the original concept of the digital yuan as a purely cash-like payment instrument that mirrors the non-interest-bearing nature of physical banknotes.
By allowing interest-bearing e-CNY holdings, the PBOC is effectively positioning the digital yuan as part of the formal banking and savings system. According to the central bank, the new framework will let financial institutions incorporate e-CNY into their asset and liability management, similar to traditional deposits. PBOC Deputy Governor Lu Lei has described this evolution as a transition toward a “digital deposit currency,” capable not just of facilitating retail payments but also of storing value and powering cross-border flows.
This repositioning has strategic implications. If individuals and companies can hold interest-bearing digital yuan directly or through commercial banks, e-CNY becomes more than a payment rail — it becomes a potential competitor to bank deposits in local and possibly foreign currencies. Coupled with mBridge, that shift opens the door for the yuan, in digital form, to be used in international trade settlement without routing through the traditional dollar-dominated correspondent banking network.
Analysts argue that the goal is not a dramatic overnight challenge to the US dollar’s reserve status, but rather a gradual building of parallel infrastructure. As Atlantic Council analyst Alisha Chhangani has noted, China and its partners are creating alternative settlement rails that reduce reliance on existing dollar-centric systems. In practice, that means exporters, importers and financial institutions could settle transactions directly in digital yuan or other participating CBDCs, potentially cutting costs, speeding up transfers and lowering exposure to dollar funding risk.
The design of mBridge is central to this strategy. The platform is structured as a shared ledger on which participating central banks can issue and redeem their own CBDCs, and financial institutions approved by those central banks can transact with one another. Transactions are settled in near real time, with on-chain records providing a single, synchronized view of balances and flows. In theory, this model can bypass many of the inefficiencies of legacy cross-border payment infrastructures, such as multiple intermediaries, time zone frictions and opaque fee structures.
Despite the technical progress, geopolitical concerns have loomed over the project. In 2024, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which had worked on mBridge through its Innovation Hub since 2021, formally stepped back from a central role in the initiative. The BIS described the move as a “graduation” — the idea being that the project had matured enough to continue without its direct involvement. However, the decision also followed mounting speculation that mBridge could be used by certain countries to soften the impact of international sanctions.
BIS General Manager Agustín Carstens publicly stressed that the institution’s systems cannot be used by sanctioned jurisdictions and rejected the narrative that mBridge was turning into a “BRICS bridge.” Yet the overlap between some mBridge participants and members of the BRICS grouping fueled debate about how CBDC-based networks might eventually be harnessed to route around Western-controlled financial pipes. In the wake of its withdrawal from mBridge, the BIS shifted more of its attention to another CBDC-related effort, Project Agorá, which involves several major Western central banks and focuses on integrating tokenized deposits and wholesale CBDCs.
For policymakers, mBridge is thus both a technological experiment and a geopolitical signal. On one hand, it offers a proof of concept for multi-CBDC platforms that could drastically improve speed and transparency in cross-border payments. On the other, it embodies a broader trend in which large economies seek greater autonomy over how value moves across borders, reducing dependence on a few dominant currencies and private sector-led networks.
From a practical standpoint, corporates involved in cross-border trade stand to benefit if the platform reaches production scale. A Chinese importer paying a Saudi oil exporter, for example, could settle in e-CNY directly over mBridge, with the Saudi side receiving either digital yuan or a local CBDC swapped on the platform. That could shorten settlement times from days to minutes and reduce foreign exchange and compliance costs, especially for transactions routed through multiple jurisdictions.
However, the road to widespread adoption is far from guaranteed. Regulatory harmonization across participating countries remains a major hurdle. Anti-money laundering, sanctions screening, data privacy and capital control rules all differ across jurisdictions, and integrating them into a shared CBDC infrastructure is a delicate task. mBridge’s current testing phase is designed to probe these frictions, but scaling to a fully live, production-level system would require a dense web of bilateral and multilateral agreements.
Another open question is how mBridge will coexist with other emerging CBDC and payment initiatives. Several regions are experimenting with their own multi-CBDC bridges or instant payment links. At the same time, private sector solutions built on blockchain and traditional fintech rails are also vying to make cross-border transfers cheaper and faster. In such an environment, interoperability — the ability for different networks to talk to each other — could determine whether mBridge becomes a dominant hub or one of many specialized corridors.
There is also a domestic dimension for China. As e-CNY becomes more integrated into banking balance sheets and everyday financial services, authorities will need to balance innovation with financial stability. If depositors migrate too aggressively from traditional bank deposits into central bank-backed digital money, that could alter banks’ funding structures and credit creation capacity. The decision to route interest payments through commercial banks, rather than directly from the central bank to users, appears designed to mitigate that risk and keep banks central to the system.
For other central banks watching from the sidelines, the trajectory of mBridge will likely serve as a real-world case study. Questions they will be tracking include: How does a multi-CBDC platform handle large-scale liquidity management? Can it maintain robust compliance controls without sacrificing speed? Will private banks embrace the model or see it as a competitive threat? And perhaps most importantly, does the emergence of such networks materially shift the currency choices of traders and investors over time?
In the broader debate on the future of money, mBridge and the digital yuan highlight a key shift: the contest is increasingly about infrastructure, not just currencies. Rather than trying to displace the dollar through direct confrontation, China and its partners are methodically building a parallel technological stack for cross-border finance. If that stack proves more efficient, more predictable and more accessible for certain regions and sectors, its influence could grow steadily — even if the dollar remains the world’s primary reserve asset for years to come.
For now, the numbers tell a story of momentum. A platform that only a short time ago was a niche pilot has processed more than $55 billion in cross-border settlements and is tightly intertwined with a domestic CBDC that has already handled trillions of yuan in value. As testing continues and more use cases are added, mBridge will be a central arena in which questions of technology, sovereignty and the international role of the yuan converge.