Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand are pooling their payment rails. On October 23 the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) announced an expanded BLOOM stablecoin initiative – short for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency – bringing Visa, Mastercard and Ripple into a public-private framework for cross-border settlement.
BLOOM is built around tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins as settlement assets, with interoperability and programmable controls designed to move money between the three countries without the usual correspondent-bank detours.
Who is in the room
The new industry participants announced this week include Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, Maybank, the World Bank Group, Airwallex, Nium, ShopeePay and Monee. They join an existing roster that already runs deep: DBS, OCBC, UOB, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan Chase, Coinbase, Circle, Anchorage Digital, StraitsX, Temasek, Stripe and Partior.
The combined market covers roughly 111 million people. Earlier BLOOM trials already had Visa and Nium testing stablecoin settlements in US dollars and euros around the clock – the expansion widens both the membership and the ambition.
What BLOOM is – and is not
It is a framework, not a live network: no production settlement has been confirmed, and the three central banks have not defined any participant’s specific mandate. Notably, settlement assets are stablecoins and tokenized deposits rather than XRP, which means the BLOOM stablecoin initiative does not automatically create new token demand even with Ripple at the table. Malaysia’s central bank, for its part, has been piloting tokenized deposit and ringgit stablecoin schemes of its own through 2026.
Why it matters
Southeast Asia sends some of the world’s most expensive remittance flows through banks that charge accordingly. A shared rail for tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins across three regulators who already talk to each other is the least glamorous and most credible version of cross-border crypto: no token launch, no yield promise – just plumbing. If the BLOOM stablecoin initiative delivers even a fraction of its trial results at scale, the winners are the 111 million people currently paying for correspondent banking friction.
