Hong Kong, UAE and Thailand to launch joint CBDC projects by 2024

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) works on two CBDC-related projects, MBridge and e-HKD.

The central banks of Hong Kong, China, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates, along with HMKA, are working on developing mBridge, a cross-border central bank digital currency (CBDC) initiative.

It is expected that the project will be launched by mid-2024. The initiative could bring an alternative to Swift’s dominant payment infrastructure by bringing a precedent for further payment fragmentation across other regions.

MBridge is coordinated under the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The project will have the participation of different significant companies such as Tencent, the owner of WeChat Pay, and the WeChat app.

HKMA is also working on another CBDC-related project known as e-HKD. Digital currency has shown different use cases, such as payment, deposits, and investment scenarios.

Eddie Yue Wai-man, CEO of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, added that e-HKD could be used in different areas like programmable payments and new regions like tokenized deposits and tokenized assets.

The institution is currently running trials with the participation of 16 major businesses. In September, HSBC issued eHKD to around 200 students and staff at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Business School, aiming to test the use of the digital currency.

Two of the pilot participants, Standard Chartered and Fubon Bank, started researching the use cases of CBDC. Fubon Bank unveiled its plans to work with Ripple (XRP) in a real estate tokenization pilot.