After MBridge and Agora, Multilateral CBDC Interoperability Is Dead
The original BIS vision of a globally interoperable CBDC empire has fallen by the wayside as countries develop bloc by bloc.gettyWhen the Bank for International Settlements walked away from Project mBridge on October 31, 2024, BIS General Manager Agustín Carstens called it a graduation. The framing has not survived the eighteen months since.mBridge has processed roughly $55.5 billion across more than 4,000 cross-border transactions. Approximately 95 percent of that volume settled in digital yuan. The current participant list is the People’s Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the UAE, and Saudi Arabia’s SAMA, which joined as a full participant in 2024. No Western central bank.In the same year BIS exited mBridge, it launched Project Agorá with seven G7-aligned central banks and more than forty private institutions including JPMorgan, Citi, HSBC, and SWIFT. The testing phase is expected to deliver findings in the first half of 2026.Most coverage has treated these as two parallel CBDC experiments. They are not. They are competing answers to the same question, sponsored by competing blocs, with no overlapping membership. The era of multilateral CBDC interoperability is over. That was the central idea behind the BIS Innovation Hub’s payments work.The promise mBridge was built to deliverProject mBridge began as Inthanon-LionRock between HKMA and the Bank of Thailand in 2019, expanded to include the PBOC and the UAEUAE central bank, and reached minimum viable product status in 2024 with SAMA’s accession. The technical premise was the only meaningfully cross-bloc multi-CBDC platform in operation. Settlement of central bank digital currencies directly, peer-to-peer, without going through correspondent banks. That bypass is what made the project both technically interesting and politically combustible. Correspondent banking is the practical layer through which Western sanctions are imposed. A rail that does not need it cannot be sanctioned through the conventional pipes.The technology worked. By late 2025, mBridge was in practice a renminbi-denominated wholesale settlement rail for trade between China and the Gulf, running outside the dollar correspondent system.Why BIS actually leftCarstens framed the exit in operational terms. The project had matured, the partners could run it themselves, the BIS had completed its hub function. The framing is too clean to take at face value.Three months before the announcement, Vladimir Putin had publicly floated a “BRICS Bridge” based on mBridge’s architecture as a route around dollar sanctions. At the Santander International Banking Conference in Madrid where Carstens declared the graduation, he was asked directly whether mBridge could be used by sanctioned states. He answered: “mBridge is not the BRICS bridge … the BIS does not operate with any countries subject to sanctions.”Read carefully, that answers a different question than the one the BIS exit raised. Why did a project that had reached MVP, with willing participants, suddenly need the BIS to leave? The graduation framing does not explain it. The geopolitical pressure does. BIS departed a project it had spent four years building, four months after a sanctioned head of state advertised the technology as a sanctions workaround.The exit was political. The post-exit participant list confirms it.Agorá preserves what mBridge replacesThe mistake in most analyst commentary has been to treat Project Agorá as the BIS pivot from mBridge. Architecturally they are not in the same category.mBridge replaces correspondent banking. Agorá preserves it. The Agorá design integrates tokenized commercial bank deposits with tokenized wholesale central bank money on a unified ledger, then routes those tokenized claims through the existing institutional structure. The central banks involved — the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Banque de France for the Eurosystem, the Bank of England, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Banco de México, and the Swiss National Bank — are the central banks with the most institutional capital invested in correspondent banking. The forty-plus private participants are the incumbent banks and infrastructures that operate it. SWIFT is in the working group.Agorá tokenizes incumbency. mBridge disintermediates it. They cannot converge.The Global South is not picking a sideThe countries with the most to gain from cross-border CBDC interoperability are not in either project, and they are not waiting for one to win.India’s NPCI International has built UPI links into Singapore via PayNow, the UAE, France, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius, and is targeting ten or more corridors by year-end 2026. Cross-border UPI volume grew from 37,060 transactions in FY24 to over 755,000 in FY25, with the first four months of FY26 alone showing 601,000. These are retail rails, not wholesale. Their advantage over Agorá and mBridge is that they exist, they settle, and the host countries have signed on without committing to a CBDC architecture.ASEAN is building the same approach as a bloc. The 2023 Leaders’ Declaration on Regional Payment Connectivity has linked Thailand’s PromptPay, Indonesia’s QRIS, Singapore’s PayNow, and Malaysia’s DuitNow into an expanding mesh, with full ASEAN interoperability targeted by the end of 2025. Intra-regional local currency settlement has more than doubled, from about 7 percent of regional payments five years ago to over 15 percent today. Brazil’s Drex CBDC pilot and Pix’s continued export ambitions follow the same logic. Build bilaterally. Avoid the bloc choice. Hedge with non-CBDC rails that already work.What this leaves us withCorporates get more rails, not fewer. Treasury teams operating across blocs will face Agorá-style tokenized correspondent flows in G7 corridors, mBridge or its successors in the China-Gulf corridor, and a growing patchwork of bilateral instant-payment links everywhere else. The compliance surface expands. The unified cross-border CBDC future that BIS papers were drafting in 2022 is not arriving.The dollar comes out entrenched within the Agorá architecture. The tokenized correspondent design preserves USD’s role as the routing currency. mBridge weakens the dollar specifically within its corridor. China to the Gulf is one of the world’s largest non-Western trade relationships and growing.SWIFT gets a reprieve. The messaging layer was supposed to be obsolesced by CBDC interoperability. Instead it is a named participant in Agorá and the de facto fallback wherever Agorá-style flows operate. ISO 20022 migration is complete. SWIFT has been repositioned as the messaging spine of the Western tokenized stack rather than its replacement.The BIS Innovation Hub was built on the premise that cross-border payments infrastructure could be designed neutrally and adopted multilaterally. Withdrawing from mBridge while launching Agorá ended that premise. The infrastructure was never neutral, and pretending otherwise was the project’s foundational illusion. What comes next is a fragmented map of bilateral, bloc-specific, and corporate-built corridors, negotiated one pair of countries at a time. There is no single global rail in it.
