Singapore’s plan to make stablecoins useful for cross-border payments just picked up two important neighbors. Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand joined the BLOOM initiative on Friday as policymaker members.
What BLOOM actually does
BLOOM stands for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency.
Behind the branding sits a public-private initiative led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). Its goal is to help financial institutions use stablecoins and tokenized deposits when moving money across borders.
Specifically, the initiative wants to set standard approaches for cross-border settlement and exchange of two kinds of digital money. The first is tokenized bank liabilities, essentially bank deposits represented on a blockchain. The second is regulated stablecoins, tokens pegged to a fiat currency and issued under official oversight.
The pitch is lower costs. By aligning regulatory frameworks across participating jurisdictions, BLOOM aims to cut the coordination expenses that make cross-border payments slow and pricey.
MAS launched BLOOM on October 16, 2025. The Malaysian and Thai central banks came aboard on October 23, 2026, roughly a year after the project began.
Who is involved, and what they’re working on
Names in the mix include stablecoin issuer Circle, Singaporean bank DBS, and payments firm Stripe. The World Bank Group is also among the participants.
The initiative’s focus is wholesale rather than retail. It targets trade finance and corporate treasury operations, the plumbing big companies use to move large sums between countries.
Core work areas include programmable compliance controls. Put simply, that means building rules like sanctions screening or transaction limits directly into the payment itself, so compliance happens automatically rather than through manual review.
Another focus is how settlement assets get distributed among major players. BLOOM also emphasizes multi-currency flexibility and standardized risk management, plus interoperability between payment systems.
One expected benefit is that cross-border transactions could flow without each pair of countries negotiating its own bilateral agreement.
The road from Orchid to BLOOM
BLOOM did not appear out of nowhere. It builds on Project Orchid, an earlier MAS effort that ran multiple trials starting in 2021.
Orchid explored practical uses for a digital Singapore dollar. It tested how programmable money might work in real settings before the regulator widened its scope to include privately issued stablecoins and tokenized deposits.
What this means for stablecoins and Southeast Asian payments
Wider Southeast Asian engagement is now anticipated, with more collaboration expected among payment networks, multilateral organizations, and private firms.
Still, membership is not the same as deployment. BNM and BOT joined as policymaker members, which means they are helping shape standards, not flipping a switch on live stablecoin rails tomorrow.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Kaye Quema. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.