Central Bank Digital Currencies are Asia‑Pacific’s sovereign answer to private crypto. They are live systems that increasingly sit under real cross‑border and interbank flows. China’s digital yuan, the e‑CNY, remains the largest live retail CBDC, with hundreds of millions of wallets and growing usage across transport, retail, and government payments. Its strategic complement is Project mBridge, the multi‑CBDC platform built by the BIS Innovation Hub together with the central banks of Hong Kong, China, Thailand, and the UAE, with Saudi Arabia now a full participant and more than two dozen other central banks and international bodies, IMF and World Bank among them, watching as observers.
Having reached the minimum viable product stage in 2024, mBridge has already processed real‑value cross‑border payments and trade finance transactions using tokenised central‑bank money. What mBridge proves is that central banks can do many of the same things stablecoin advocates promised—atomic cross‑border settlement, programmable trade finance, 24/7 availability—without handing control of settlement assets to private issuers. In pilots across at least 15 use cases, banks in participating jurisdictions have used wholesale CBDCs on mBridge to settle commercial payments, ecommerce, and supply‑chain finance in seconds rather than days, in trade corridors worth over USD 730 billion a year. That is both a new rail for Web 3 payment players to plug into and a potential competitor to the fee pools of today’s correspondent banking model.
India has chosen a different path but with the same instinct, which is to keep the sovereign hand on the tiller. Instead of expanding private rupee‑linked tokens, India is channelling innovation into the e‑rupee, adding programmability, and exploring cross‑border pilots rather than opening the door to foreign or privately issued INR stablecoins. RBI has signalled that bilateral CBDC pilots for cross‑border payments are the next step and has agreed with the UAE to test a CBDC bridge for remittances and trade, but these pilots are still in the exploration and design phase rather than live production. For global payment operators, that means the ‘on‑ramp’ for digital rupee flows will be state rails, not private Web 3 instruments, at least for the foreseeable future.
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