Cross-Border Payments Platform Project mBridge Processed $55.49B in Transaction Volume

The China-backed cross-border payments platform Project mBridge is reportedly set to erode the dominance of the dollar in some corridors, sectors and use cases.

The platform has processed 4,047 transactions with a total transaction volume of $55.49 billion as of November, the Atlantic Council said in a Thursday (Jan. 15) blog post.

Those figures are up from the 160 transactions with a total transaction volume of $22 million that were processed by October 2022, when the project was being led by the Bank for International Settlements’ BIS Innovation Hub, the post said.

The BIS stepped away from the project and transferred governance to participating central banks in October 2024, the post said.

Today, Project mBridge’s participants include the People’s Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates and the Central Bank of Saudi Arabia, per the post.

China’s digital yuan, the e-CNY, now makes up over 95% of Project mBridge’s total settlement volume, according to the post.

Project mBridge’s viability for public sector payments was demonstrated in November when the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Finance and the Dubai Department of Finance executed a government financial transaction using the wholesale digital dirham on the platform, the post said.

Moving forward, the platform is increasingly used for trade settlement, especially for transactions linked to energy and commodities, per the post.

“Taken together, these developments point to a gradual expansion of the yuan’s internationalization through digital infrastructure,” Alisha Chhangani, associate director at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomic Center, wrote in the post. “Rather than seeking to displace the dollar outright, China is building parallel settlement rails that reduce reliance on dollar-based systems. Project mBridge is unlikely to challenge dollar dominance directly, but it may incrementally erode it across specific corridors, sectors and use cases.”

The Bank for International Settlement said in October 2022 that Project mBridge was a collaborative pilot for cross-border central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and that the platform was an example of what BIS called a “multi-CBDC” arrangement in which different national CBDCs are exchanged within a single technical infrastructure.

BIS handed Project mBridge over to the project’s partners in October 2024.