Twenty-five industry participants. Three central banks. Two stablecoins holding $254.1 billion between them. Those are the numbers behind the cross-border digital-money push the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) assembled this week — and they are also the numbers that explain why the same plumbing keeps drawing warnings from global regulators.
On 23 October, MAS confirmed that Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) joined its BLOOM initiative as policymaker members, and that nine more firms signed on, according to the central bank’s announcement. BLOOM — Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency — now counts 25 industry participants alongside three central banks, all coordinating how tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins get accepted, exchanged, and settled across borders.
The headline number is not 25. It is 84.7%.
Sixteen Members Became Twenty-Five in One Announcement
BLOOM is a public-private forum, not a payment rail. MAS launched it to get policymakers, banks, payment networks, and technology providers to agree on common approaches for cross-border digital money, so institutions do not have to build a separate arrangement for every counterparty and market.
The existing roster was already deep. It included Anchorage Digital, Ant International, Circle, Coinbase, DBS, J.P. Morgan, Kasikornbank, OCBC, Partior, Schroders, Standard Chartered, StraitsX, Stripe, Temasek, UOB, and Xweave. The 23 October expansion added Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay, Visa, and the World Bank Group.
That is nine new members on a base of sixteen, a 56% expansion in a single announcement. The World Bank Group is the first multilateral development bank in the room, bringing the payment-modernization and financial-inclusion perspective of developing economies.
Broken down, the 25 industry participants now span roughly seven commercial banks, two card networks, two stablecoin issuers, six payments and fintech firms, two exchange and custody players, one settlement-infrastructure operator, two asset managers or investors, and one multilateral development bank. No single category dominates the consortium, which is the point: settlement only works if every layer of the stack agrees.
The Central Banks Are on Both Sides of This Trade
Here is the tension the data does not resolve on its own. The same week MAS, BNM, and BOT were formalizing their BLOOM roles, the Financial Stability Board was flagging cross-border stablecoin activity as a live risk. BlockchainReporter covered the FSB’s October assessment of a near-$300 billion market, including the supervisory gaps that come with it.
Central banks are now on both sides of that trade: warning about the risks of cross-border stablecoins while building the very coordination layer meant to make them safer to use. BNM Deputy Governor Aznan bin Abdul Aziz framed it as a delivery problem, not a fantasy problem: “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.”
Bank of Thailand Deputy Governor Daranee Saeju was more guarded. “The initiative also allows us to carefully explore emerging innovations, while ensuring our oversight remains prudent, proportionate, and responsive to evolving risks,” she said. The word “prudent” is the tell — the central banks want the rails, but they want them supervised.
The Money Is Already Moving Without Them
The countercase writes itself. Cross-border digital money does not wait for a coordination forum. Tether’s USDT held a market cap of $182.5 billion and Circle’s USDC $71.6 billion as of 24 October, per CoinGecko data — $254.1 billion combined, moving over public blockchains without any central bank acting as policymaker member.
Private rails have also gone live ahead of BLOOM. Mastercard’s Global Money Platform, which unifies stablecoin and fiat payments, launched earlier in October. Mastercard is now also a BLOOM participant, which means the firm is simultaneously operating a private settlement product and sitting in a public-sector coordination body.
The risk for BLOOM is not that it fails. It is that the market settles on standards without it.
The $254 Billion Coordination Problem
This is where the concentration math matters. USDT plus USDC equals $254.1 billion. If the total stablecoin market is roughly $300 billion, as the FSB’s assessment and prior BlockchainReporter reporting put it, then two tokens account for about 84.7% of the entire market. That is the original calculation the source does not state, and it is the number that makes BLOOM’s “multiple digital monies” framing hard.
A cross-border network that wants tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins to interoperate still has to connect to the two rails that actually carry the volume. MAS Deputy Managing Director Leong Sing Chiong acknowledged the coordination cost directly: “To fully harness the benefits of using digital money, collaboration among policymakers and industry participants will be needed to address practical issues around acceptance, settlement and interoperability.”
Interoperability is not a technical nicety here. It is the difference between a consortium that issues a paper framework and one that lets a Malaysian ringgit tokenized deposit settle against a Singapore dollar stablecoin without routing through a dollar corridor first.
What BLOOM Does Not Do
BLOOM has three workstreams: acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions, interoperability across digital-money arrangements, and programmable controls such as identity verification, sanctions screening, and transaction controls. All three are framework work.
The initiative does not move money. It has not announced a launch date for a live settlement network, published a transaction volume, or specified which blockchain or messaging standard the participants will converge on. It also does not solve the two problems that make cross-border payments expensive today: foreign-exchange liquidity and correspondent-bank compliance friction. Those are operational realities that no coordination body can legislate away in one announcement.
None of this makes the announcement empty. It makes it conditional.
The Signal That Would Matter
The next observable test is not another membership update. It is whether a bank inside the consortium settles a real cross-border tokenized-deposit or regulated-stablecoin transaction using a BLOOM-aligned approach, and whether BNM or BOT issue domestic standards that reference BLOOM’s interoperability framework.
Until that happens, the most honest read of 23 October is that the coordination layer is expanding faster than the settlement layer. The data says twenty-five firms and three central banks now agree on the problem. It does not yet say they agree on the solution.
Market data is from CoinGecko as of October 24, 2026, and the participant list and quotes are from the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s announcement dated October 23, 2026.
Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only.
