Malaysia and Thailand Central Banks Join Singapore's BLOOM, With Ripple and Visa
MAS says the three central banks will work with firms including Ripple, Visa and Mastercard on how stablecoins and tokenized deposits settle across borders. No XRP role was announced.
By Fueled Crypto Newsroom · AI-assisted · 3 min read
Singapore's central bank said Friday that Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand have joined BLOOM, its project on how digital money moves between countries, as "policymaker members." In the same release, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) named nine new industry participants, including Ripple, Visa, Mastercard and the World Bank Group.
BLOOM stands for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency. MAS launched it in October 2025, according to The Business Times. It isn't a new coin or a single payment network. It's a working group where regulators and companies try to agree on common ways to accept, exchange and settle different kinds of digital money, mainly tokenized bank deposits and regulated stablecoins, across institutions and borders.
Who's in it now
According to MAS and its list of BLOOM participants (PDF), the new industry names are Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay, Visa and the World Bank Group.
They join existing participants Anchorage Digital, Ant International, Circle, Coinbase, DBS, J.P. Morgan, Kasikornbank, OCBC, Partior, Schroders, Standard Chartered, StraitsX, Stripe, Temasek, UOB and Xweave.
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MAS said the World Bank Group's role is to bring "the perspectives and needs of developing economies" to the work.
What they'll work on
MAS listed three focus areas:
Acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions: how a bank or payment firm in one country accepts and settles digital money issued somewhere else.
Interoperability: getting different networks and forms of digital money to work together.
Programmable controls: safeguards like identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction controls inside digital-money payments.
The work also covers how international standards and each country's supervisory rules apply, "while allowing for differences in local requirements," MAS said. Malay Mail covered the announcement from the Malaysian side.
"A future where frictionless cross-border payments can be made using multiple digital monies is now closer to a tangible reality than a far-fetched fantasy," said Aznan bin Abdul Aziz, a deputy governor at Bank Negara Malaysia.
The Bank of Thailand's Daranee Saeju, deputy governor for payment systems, was more measured. She said BLOOM will help the bank "carefully explore emerging innovations, while ensuring our oversight remains prudent, proportionate, and responsive to evolving risks."
Where Ripple fits
Ripple runs a cross-border payments business and issues the RLUSD stablecoin, so a seat at a central-bank table on cross-border digital money fits what it sells. But MAS didn't say what Ripple will build or test, and nothing in the release mentions XRP or the XRP Ledger. Some posts on X on Friday claimed a specific Ripple pilot; we couldn't find an official source for that, so we're leaving it out. Our XRP page has the background on Ripple and XRP, and our GENIUS Act explainer covers how the U.S. now regulates stablecoins.
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