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1. Two More Central Banks Join Singapore's BLOOM Initiative
The central banks of Malaysia and Thailand have joined BLOOM, the cross-border digital money initiative led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the city-state's central bank and financial regulator. MAS announced the expansion on October 23. BLOOM is designed to let banks and payment companies settle international transactions using regulated stablecoins and tokenized deposits, and with the two new policymaker members it now has three central banks at the table.
Until this week, MAS was the only central bank running the program. Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand now sit beside it, which turns what began as a Singapore-led project into a small regional policy group. The announcement, however, stops short of naming any specific token, pilot or launch date, a gap that shapes how much the news should be read as a signal of imminent products.
2. What Is BLOOM and What Will the Members Work On?
BLOOM is a framework meant to make different forms of digital money work together across borders. Its focus is practical: how an institution in one country accepts a digital payment instrument issued elsewhere, how that payment is settled, and how separate token networks are connected so that value can pass between them without manual workarounds.
The joint work also covers controls built into the transactions themselves. These include sanctions screening and other transaction-level safeguards, which regulated institutions must apply to every payment regardless of whether it moves on a traditional rail or a blockchain. Building such checks into shared infrastructure is meant to keep compliance obligations intact as settlement shifts to tokens.
The MAS release states a clear commercial aim. By agreeing common approaches, BLOOM seeks to reduce the need for financial institutions to establish separate arrangements with each counterparty or market. Today, a bank wishing to move tokenized money to partners in several jurisdictions may have to negotiate technical, legal and operational terms with each one individually. A shared framework would, in principle, replace that web of bilateral deals with a common set of expectations.
3. What Did the Central Bank Officials Say?
Leong Sing Chiong, a deputy managing director at MAS, said in the release that collaboration between policymakers and industry will be needed to solve practical problems. He identified those problems as acceptance, settlement and interoperability, the three areas that determine whether a digital payment instrument can be used outside the system in which it was created.
Aznan bin Abdul Aziz, a deputy governor at Bank Negara Malaysia, said that frictionless cross-border payments using multiple forms of digital money are now closer to reality than to fantasy. The remark reflects a view that the technology has moved beyond experimentation, although the release itself does not describe any live service.
Daranee Saeju, a deputy governor at the Bank of Thailand, said her institution will use BLOOM to help shape forward-looking regulatory approaches to tokenized money. That wording points to a rule-making role rather than a commercial one: the Thai central bank intends to use the forum to inform how it regulates such instruments.
Thailand's interest in stablecoin oversight is not new. In July, the Bank of Thailand worked with the country's securities regulator to flag suspicious stablecoin trades, an indication that authorities there are already watching how these assets are used in practice.
4. Which Tokens Could Move Through BLOOM?
The release is notable for what it leaves out. MAS names no stablecoin, no tokenized deposit product, no payment corridor and no start date, and it describes nothing operating under BLOOM as live. Circle and StraitsX, both issuers of regulated stablecoins, are among the members, but MAS does not link either company's token to the program.
The only token publicly tied to a BLOOM pilot is RLUSD, the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Ripple. In March, Ripple said it would test RLUSD with Unloq, a trade finance firm, in an arrangement that releases payments once a shipment has been verified. That design pairs a payment with a real-world event, which is a common use case for programmable money in trade settlement.
A second pilot was disclosed in August, when Visa said it would trial weekend and holiday settlement under BLOOM together with the payments firm Nium. That test is to use dollar and euro stablecoins, though the specific tokens were not named. Settlement outside banking hours is one of the frequently cited advantages of tokenized money, because conventional systems in many countries pause on weekends and public holidays.
For readers tracking the stablecoin sector, the distinction matters. Membership in a policy forum is not the same as the adoption of a particular token, and until MAS or the participating institutions identify instruments and timelines, the announcement should be treated as an expansion of the governance and industry circle rather than a product launch.
5. Who Else Joined the Industry Group?
The announcement also lengthened the list of industry participants. New members include Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, Nium, Airwallex, Maybank, ShopeePay and Monee. The World Bank Group joined as well, under a separate category created for development lenders.
Several of these names were not entirely new to the public. Ripple, Visa, Nium and Maybank had disclosed their involvement earlier in 2026, so the release formalizes roles that were partly visible already. MAS's annex counts 24 industry members in total.
The mix is broad. It combines global card networks, a cross-border payments company, a stablecoin issuer, regional banks, consumer payment apps and a multilateral development institution. That range suggests the program is trying to bring together the parties that would need to cooperate for tokenized money to work across jurisdictions: those who issue it, those who move it and those who supervise it.
6. How Did BLOOM Begin?
MAS unveiled BLOOM in October 2025 as the next step after Project Orchid, its research program on a digital Singapore dollar, which dates back to 2021. Orchid explored what programmable digital money could do; BLOOM moves toward connecting such money across institutions and borders.
The program launched with 16 founding members. They included the stablecoin issuer Circle, the exchange Coinbase, the custody firm Anchorage Digital, the banks DBS, J.P. Morgan and Kasikornbank, the Singapore dollar stablecoin issuer StraitsX, and the payments company Stripe. The founding group already mixed crypto-native firms with large incumbent banks, a pattern that the latest additions extend.
Together, the founding members and the new entrants show a deliberate strategy by Singapore's regulator: rather than prescribing a single technology, it invites competing issuers, networks and banks to work out common standards under supervisory oversight.
7. How Do Stablecoins Differ From Tokenized Deposits?
The two instruments named in the BLOOM description are related but distinct. A stablecoin is a token issued by a company, usually backed by reserves such as cash and short-term government securities, and designed to hold a steady value against a currency like the US dollar. Its holders have a claim on the issuer rather than a deposit at a bank.
A tokenized deposit, by contrast, is a bank deposit recorded as a token on a digital ledger. It remains a liability of the commercial bank that issued it, which means it sits inside the existing banking and deposit-protection framework. Banks favor it because it keeps customer money on their balance sheets while allowing faster, programmable transfers.
Both types raise the same cross-border questions that BLOOM was built to address. A receiving institution must decide whether it will accept the instrument, how quickly the transfer becomes final, and whether the tokens can move from one blockchain network to another. Because no single issuer or network can answer these questions alone, a forum that includes regulators, banks, card networks and token issuers offers a way to settle them together.
The distinction also explains why central banks have a stake. They oversee money and payments in their economies, and any widely used digital money, whether issued by a bank or a company, affects how those systems function. Joining BLOOM gives the Malaysian and Thai authorities a direct view of the technical and legal choices being made.
8. Why Does Central Bank Participation Matter?
Stablecoins and tokenized deposits are issued by private companies and banks, but their usefulness in cross-border payments depends heavily on regulators. A token that one jurisdiction treats as a regulated payment instrument may face different treatment, or none at all, in another. When central banks sit in the same forum, they can compare rules and look for compatible standards before products reach scale.
The presence of Malaysian and Thai authorities adds two neighboring economies with close commercial ties to Singapore. Payments between these markets cover trade, remittances and e-commerce, and the same institutions that appear in the BLOOM member list, such as Maybank and ShopeePay, operate across several of them. Greater regulatory alignment would be directly relevant to those businesses.
Participation also signals that policymakers prefer to shape the technology from the inside. Daranee Saeju's comment on forward-looking regulatory approaches makes that explicit: the central bank sees the forum as a place to develop policy, not only to observe industry progress.
9. What Happens Next for BLOOM?
MAS has not published a timetable. The release does not say when the new central banks will begin contributing to specific workstreams, when pilots could go live or which stablecoins and tokenized deposits might be used. The two disclosed pilots, one involving Ripple's RLUSD and Unloq and the other involving Visa and Nium, remain the clearest indications of practical testing.
The next developments to watch are whether MAS or its members name instruments and corridors, whether further central banks join, and whether the existing pilots produce results that can be shared. Until then, BLOOM's expansion shows growing institutional and official interest in regulated digital money across Southeast Asia, without yet showing a live payment network.