Attack on the Green Card

Riyadh abandons mBridge, a platform that started out as an anti-dollar initiative and ended up as an anti-sanctions one

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority has withdrawn from the wholesale digital currency project launched by the Bank for International Settlements and now managed by China, Hong Kong and Thailand. Saudi Arabia’s decision marks a distancing from a system that, in just a few years, has become a closed, China-led model driven by digital yuan. This is useful for circumventing Western sanctions.

by 24Ore NextMed

24 September 2026

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Il presidente della Repubblica Popolare Cinese Xi Jinping (EPA/Andres Martinez Casares)

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Anti-dollar geopolitics and anti-sanctions networks. An upheaval in the world of digital currencies created with the aim of challenging the dominance of the US dollar. The Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority has abandoned the mBridge platform, not only bidding farewell to a multilateral trial of wholesale digital currencies, but also exposing a structural rift in international financial governance. A rift that Europe should not view with the detachment typical of those who regard the matter as an exclusively Asian affair. The political decision by Riyadh is, in fact, a distancing from a platform that, in just a few years, has transformed into a closed circuit with a Chinese focus, driven by digital yuan. Ultimately, it serves almost exclusively to circumvent Western sanctions.

The origins of the platform

The mBridge platform, conceived in 2021 under the auspices of the Bank for International Settlements and the innovation centres in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Abu Dhabi, was designed to enable central banks to settle cross-border transactions in sovereign digital currencies via a permissioned distributed ledger, bypassing the dollar-denominated chain of correspondent banks that forms the backbone of the SWIFT system.

The Saudi withdrawal, formally described by Riyadh as the planned conclusion of a technical mandate – which began with observer status in 2023 and continued as a full member from June 2024 – takes place against a backdrop in which the Bank for International Settlements had already withdrawn from the project on 31 October 2024, transferring full governance to the steering committee comprising the People’s Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand and the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, to which the Bank of Mongolia was added in June 2026.

A comparison of volumes

The platform’s scale – having processed a cumulative volume of approximately $55.5 billion across more than four thousand cross-border transactions by the second quarter of 2026 – might suggest that mBridge now represents acredible multi-currency alternative to the dollar-denominated clearing system. However, the figure that immediately dispels this illusion is the breakdown of the volume: 95 per cent of the transactions settled on the platform are denominated in digital yuan.

The People’s Bank of China formally repositioned the digital yuan in January 2026, transforming it from a predominantly retail instrument into a vehicle for cross-border wholesale settlement. The former General Manager of the BIS, Agustín Carstens, in announcing his departure from the Basel-based institution, stated that ‘mBridge is not the bridge of the BRICS’ and that the BIS ‘does not operate with any country subject to sanctions’, a statement which, when viewed against the backdrop of the pressure exerted by Washington for the BIS to disengage from the platform, reveals the institution’s awareness that the project was by then perceived as a means of circumventing the US secondary sanctions regime, as codified in Executive Order 14114, which authorises the US Treasury to exclude foreign financial institutions from dollar clearing should they facilitate transactions with designated entities.

Transactions in Macao

The commercial launch of Macao, which took place on 2 June 2026 with twenty-three cross-border transactions carried out on the first day of operations by institutions including the Bank of Communications Macau, demonstrates that the technical infrastructure is functioning at the delivery-versus-payment settlement level within sub-second timeframes. However, twenty-three transactions in a single day, even when multiplied by an optimistic growth curve, remain an insignificant order of magnitude compared to the $6,600 billion in daily volume of the global foreign exchange market that passes through correspondent banking networks.

What the launch of Macau confirms is not the ability of mBridge to replace the dollar, but rather the platform’s ability to operate as a closed, sanctions-agnostic system for the settlement of regional trade flows between mainland China, South-East Asia and the Gulf, without any Western institutional participants.

The architectural constraint that prevents foreign commercial banks from holding digital currencies mBridge on a permanent basis, by incorporating capital controls and exchange rate management as design principles within the ledger’s code itself, guarantees participants’ monetary sovereignty whilst simultaneously precluding the formation of those deep offshore markets that gave the Eurodollar system its gravitational pull in the twentieth century.

The intersection with the digital euro

The convergence amongst the major European economies on this issue is, as things stand, more declaratory than operational. The European Union has, through the Commission and the European External Action Service, launched a review into reducing strategic dependencies in the financial sector, but the digital euro remains a project of the European Central Bank, the governance of which is separate from that of the Common Foreign and Security Policy.

The regulation on crypto-asset markets, known as MiCA, deals with the regulation of digital assets issued by private entities but does not regulate digital currencies issued by third-party sovereign central banks, leaving a regulatory gap that concerns precisely the type of instrument that mBridge uses for cross-border settlement.

NATO, for its part, has included the resilience of critical infrastructure, including payment systems, amongst the priorities of the strategic concept adopted in Madrid in 2022 and updated in Vilnius in 2023, but it does not have an operational mandate to coordinate the Allies’ response to the proliferation of payment systems alternative to the dollar, treating the matter as falling within the remit of national economic policy rather than collective defence.

Over the coming months, mBridge will continue to grow in terms of transaction volume, driven by the expansion of trade corridors between China, South-East Asia, the Gulf and Central Asia. The volume will remain denominated in renminbi, reinforcing the platform’s character as an instrument of Chinese monetary policy rather than as a neutral infrastructure; the absence of a Western anchor institution will mean that any future US sanctions against a participant will lack an institutional mediation mechanism, exposing commercial banks operating on the platform to unilateral decisions by the US Treasury without the possibility of a multilateral appeal.