Saudi Arabia has confirmed that it left mBridge, the China-backed cross-border central bank digital currency platform, saying its participation ended when a planned proof of concept finished in May 2025. The withdrawal removes the largest Gulf economy from a payment project that has drawn sustained scrutiny in Washington over its potential to settle transactions without the dollar in the middle.
According to a Financial Times report published on Sunday, the Saudi Central Bank, known as SAMA, confirmed it is no longer a participating member of mBridge after completing its proof of concept on May 13, 2025. The central bank framed the departure as the planned end of a test, not a political decision.
“As planned, SAMA successfully completed its mBridge proof of concept on 13 May 2025. Following the completion of the PoC, SAMA is no longer a participating member of mBridge,” the Saudi Central Bank said.
Riyadh’s path through the project was short and contained. The central bank joined as an observing member in 2023 under the Bank for International Settlements, moved to active participation in 2024 alongside China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, and ran its trial through 2024 and into 2025. The BIS itself had exited the project a year earlier, in October 2024, with general manager Agustin Carstens insisting the institution had “graduated out” because the participating central banks were capable of continuing the work on their own. Carstens rejected suggestions that the departure was political, though the FT separately reported that Washington had pressed the institution to withdraw.
A quiet exit, contested readings
The obvious question is why Riyadh walked away, and the answer depends on who is asked. A person familiar with the matter told the FT that it would be “inaccurate to draw any wider inference” from the decision, because SAMA’s involvement in mBridge had been limited from the start. A second person said the central bank no longer wanted to be publicly associated with the project but continued to engage with it more discreetly.
SAMA’s own account of its timeline has been consistent. The central bank says it joined as an observer, took part in developing the platform’s minimum viable product, and ran its proof of concept in 2024, completing it on schedule. Nothing in that sequence required a public announcement of departure, which is one reason the confirmation took more than sixteen months to surface. The FT report did the work of extracting it, and the political reading followed within hours of publication.
Washington’s interest in the platform is not difficult to explain. mBridge allows participating central banks to transact in their own digital currencies and settle payments and foreign exchange directly, without the dollar serving as the intermediary currency in every transaction. That design touches the core of how cross-border money moves today, which still runs largely through correspondent banking networks denominated in dollars.
Daleep Singh, who served as deputy national security adviser for international economics under former president Joe Biden, warned in 2025 that China could gain considerable influence over standards governing privacy, security, interoperability and the enforcement of US sanctions through the platform. That warning has framed American coverage of mBridge ever since, and it is the backdrop against which every participant departure gets read.
Macau joined the network after the BIS exit, going live in June 2026 and extending mBridge beyond its founding monetary authorities. The system is now moving toward commercial use, which makes the composition of its membership more consequential than it was during the testing years.
What China is building alongside it
Beijing has not treated mBridge as its only channel for cross-border digital currency work. In July, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China completed the first digital yuan payment between China and Singapore through the upgraded Digital Currency Express platform, settling nearly 10 million yuan in import shipping fees with the funds reaching the Singapore recipient the same day. ICBC’s Inner Mongolia branch later completed a 220 million yuan transfer to Hong Kong through the multilateral CBDC bridge.
Domestically, the network keeps widening. The People’s Bank of China added eight commercial banks to the e-CNY operating network in August, bringing the number of service operators to 30. Official figures cited when China revised its digital yuan framework showed the currency had processed 3.48 billion transactions by November 2025, and beginning in January 2026, verified digital yuan wallets were permitted to earn interest, moving the currency beyond its earlier electronic cash model.
Wang Xin, director general of the PBOC Research Bureau, said in June that stablecoins could take on a larger role in international payments while calling for closer monitoring of their effect on payment infrastructure and the international monetary system. The central bank has been tracking stablecoin use as a parallel settlement channel, not only as a competitor.
The pattern across these projects is consistent: Beijing is building redundancy. If mBridge slows, Digital Currency Express carries cross-border yuan settlement. If foreign participants drift away, the domestic e-CNY network keeps compounding. Saudi Arabia’s exit trims one node from one network without touching any of the others.
How the project got here
| Date | Development |
|---|---|
| 2023 | SAMA joins mBridge as an observing member under the BIS |
| 2024 | Saudi Arabia becomes an active participant alongside China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE |
| October 2024 | The BIS exits the project; Agustin Carstens says it “graduated out” |
| May 13, 2025 | SAMA completes its proof of concept and ends participation |
| June 2026 | Macau goes live on mBridge, extending the network |
| September 2026 | The FT confirms SAMA’s exit, drawing US political attention back to the project |
Why it matters for dollar settlement
In pure transaction volume, mBridge remains small. In signal, it is anything but. The platform is the most developed attempt by a group of major central banks, with China at the center, to build settlement rails that do not require the dollar as an intermediary. Every departure and every addition to its membership gets parsed for what it says about the balance between financial efficiency and geopolitical alignment.
The United States is building its own answer on a different track. Treasury’s proposed rule for the GENIUS Act, issued on August 17, seeks comment on implementing payment stablecoin requirements, with an expected effective date of January 18, 2027. The American bet is that regulated dollar stablecoins, issued by private firms under federal rules, will hold the cross-border role that state-run CBDC rails are trying to claim. The two models are now competing for the same job from opposite ends: one run by central banks, the other by issuers licensed under statute.
For Saudi Arabia, the calculation looks practical rather than ideological. The kingdom keeps its dollar peg, keeps its access to Western capital markets, and, according to the FT’s sources, keeps a discreet channel into the technology it spent two years testing. Dropping the public membership removes a political irritant without closing the door.
The larger story is that cross-border settlement is being rebuilt in parallel by central banks, by commercial banks experimenting with tokenized deposits, and by stablecoin issuers. Saudi Arabia stepping back from mBridge does not settle which of those models wins. It does remove the most prominent Arab participant from the project that Washington watches most closely, and it leaves China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE and Macau carrying a platform whose politics have always been bigger than its volumes.