Malaysia and Thailand’s central banks have joined BLOOM, a Monetary Authority of Singapore initiative focused on cross-border settlement using tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins. Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand are entering the programme as policymaker members alongside industry participants.
MAS said the expanded group will work on common approaches for how different forms of digital money can be accepted, exchanged, and settled across institutions, networks, and national borders. The move broadens a project that is aimed at creating shared operating rules rather than separate arrangements for each market or counterparty.
Central banks added to MAS-led programme
Under the new expansion, Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand will collaborate with participants in BLOOM to help shape policy and operational approaches for cross-border digital money use. Their role is tied to policymaking rather than commercial deployment, with a focus on how tokenised forms of money could work within a regulated framework.
The Bank of Thailand said the project can help inform regulatory approaches for tokenised money, especially in cross-border payments and wholesale settlement, while still maintaining prudent oversight. That framing suggests the initiative is intended to support rulemaking and market structure design as much as technology testing.
Nine more participants join the network
MAS also announced nine additional participants: Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay, Visa, and the World Bank Group. They join the initial cohort formed when BLOOM was launched in October 2025.
According to MAS, the World Bank Group will contribute perspectives from developing economies. The broader mix of banks, payment companies, and infrastructure firms gives the project a wider base as it works on standards that could apply across different systems and jurisdictions.
What BLOOM is designed to solve
The programme is centred on three areas of cross-border digital money settlement. These are the acceptance and settlement of digital monies, interoperability between networks, and programmable controls built into transactions.
Those controls include functions such as identity verification, sanctions screening, and transaction limits. MAS said the goal is to align commercial and operating arrangements so institutions do not need to build separate setups for every counterparty or market they deal with.
Existing regional links and next steps
BLOOM grew out of Project Orchid, MAS’s digital Singapore dollar programme. Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand already have a separate foundation for payments cooperation through Nexus Global Payments, which links domestic instant payment systems.
MAS did not announce a timeline for pilots or name any planned transactions in the latest release. For now, the near-term output is expected to be implementation frameworks and operating standards, with any later use in live cross-border settlement still dependent on how participating institutions and regulators choose to apply those frameworks.
Source: www.blockhead.co