The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) announced on Wednesday that the central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform has successfully conducted the largest cross-border transactions to date after entering the pilot phase in September.

On the mBridge platform, which is a collaboration project between the BIS Innovation Hub Hong Kong Centre, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the Bank of Thailand, the People's Bank of China, and the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, 20 banks in the four jurisdictions conducted 164 payment and foreign exchange transactions totaling over $22 million in six weeks.

The pilot is among the first multi-CBDC projects to settle real-value, cross-border transactions on behalf of corporates, the BIS said in a press release.

"We sincerely hope that the central banking community will find our pilot insights useful to their own exploration for using CBDC to expedite cross-border payments, and encourage them to join Project mBridge either as an observer or participant to maximize the network effect and realize the potential of the project to the fullest," said Howard Lee, deputy chief executive of the HKMA, according to an HKMA press release also posted on Wednesday.

Project mBridge is designed as a common platform based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) for central banks to conduct multi-currency cross-border payments in their CBDCs. It aims to solve long-standing inefficiencies in cross-border payments.

More countries are approaching CBDCs, although with caution, to explore an alternative to decentralized cryptocurrencies.

Currently, 105 countries and regions are exploring CBDCs, according to a CBDC tracker made by think tank the Atlantic Council.

China's central bank announced last week that its CDBC transaction volume had surpassed 100.04 billion yuan ($13.86 billion) since the pilot began in 2020.

(Cover photo via CFP)