Malaysia and Thailand Join Singapore's BLOOM as Nine Firms Sign On

Two more central banks have joined the cross-border payments program Singapore started a year ago. The Monetary Authority of Singapore said on Friday that Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand are now policymaker members of BLOOM, which tests how financial institutions might settle payments across borders in stablecoins and tokenized deposits. Nine industry and multilateral participants signed on the same day, Mastercard, Visa, Ripple and the World Bank Group among them. The release sets no timetable. It also gives no total for how large BLOOM now is.

The release prints names, not a count

The nine arrivals are Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay, Visa and the World Bank Group. Sixteen participants were already in, among them Anchorage Digital, Ant International, Circle, Coinbase, DBS, J.P. Morgan, Kasikornbank, OCBC, Partior, Schroders, Standard Chartered, StraitsX, Stripe, Temasek, UOB and Xweave. Counted off the page, that is twenty-five firms and institutions, though MAS states no figure and points to an annex instead. CryptoPotato, writing at 21:52 UTC on Friday, put the roster at 24 industry members. The two counts do not reconcile. Nothing MAS has published settles which is right, and the release is the only document any of the four accounts read here could point to.

Three things the program is testing

MAS set out the work in three parts. The first is acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions: how institutions take in different forms of digital money, and how a transaction settles when more than one market is involved. The second is interoperability, meaning whether these arrangements function across separate networks, infrastructures and borders. The third is programmable controls, which are safeguards written into the payment itself, among them identity verification, watchlist screening and limits on what a transaction may do. Cointelegraph reported the scope stretching past bank-to-bank transfers into corporate cash management, trade finance and payments made by AI agents inside preset limits.

"The future of finance will involve multiple forms of digital money operating across different institutions and markets," said Leong Sing Chiong, MAS deputy managing director for markets and development.

What the two new members bring

Bank Negara Malaysia has its own track running. It announced three initiatives in February to test ringgit stablecoins and tokenized deposits for domestic and cross-border wholesale payments during 2026, Cointelegraph reported, and its deputy governor Aznan bin Abdul Aziz pointed on Friday to frictionless cross-border payments made in several digital monies. CryptoPotato says the bank also plans clearer guidance on ringgit stablecoins and tokenized deposits by the end of this year; one account carries that, and it stands unverified elsewhere. Daranee Saeju, the Bank of Thailand's deputy governor for payment systems stability and financial services supervision, said her institution "welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with the Monetary Authority of Singapore on BLOOM." The Block puts Thailand's interest in regulatory approaches to tokenized money, cross-border payments and wholesale settlement in particular. Thailand's securities regulator has separately moved to bar stablecoin transfers to any wallet but the sender's own, a different body working the same asset class.

No date for anything to go live

Friday's release commits to no milestone at all. Ripple joined in March and tests RLUSD, its dollar stablecoin, on the XRP Ledger. The Block adds that Unloq, a supply chain fintech, runs a trade payments trial on its SC+ platform where a payment releases once preset conditions are met; Unloq appears in neither participant list MAS published, and The Block is the only account read here that names it. No test result, no volume and no dollar figure turns up in the release or in the three outlet reports filed alongside it. Standard Chartered, one of the sixteen already signed up, has its own plans for institutional crypto custody in Singapore. BLOOM itself grew out of Project Orchid, the digital Singapore dollar work MAS began in 2021. What the three central banks have agreed on is a way of working toward common approaches. When any of it moves real money is open.