Saudi Arabia's central bank exits mBridge after a single proof of concept

More than $55bn had moved across mBridge as of an Atlantic Council report early this year, a roughly 2,500-fold increase since 2022 ^[12]. Work the multiple backwards and 2022's traffic was about $22m ^[23]. The Atlantic Council's Alisha Chhangani told Reuters in January that "Project mBridge is unlikely to challenge dollar dominance directly, but it may incrementally erode it" ^[14]. The dollar is used in about 90% of global transactions ^[15].

SAMA's own account of its membership is four lines long. In a statement reported by the Financial Times, the central bank said it had completed its mBridge proof of concept as planned on 13 May 2025, and that following the completion of the PoC it was no longer a participating member of mBridge ^[2]. The two published versions of how it got there do not match. Fortune, citing the FT, has the Saudi central bank joining in 2023 "under the umbrella of BIS as an observing member" and then working on a proof of concept in 2024 ^[3]; Cointelegraph, also citing the FT, has it joining as a full participant in June 2024 and saying it had always planned to stop ^[4]. On the second version the membership ran about eleven months ^[22].

A source told the FT that the Saudi Central Bank no longer wanted to be publicly involved with mBridge ^[9]. Asked whether the kingdom had come under US pressure to withdraw, another source said it would be "inaccurate to draw any wider inference" ^[10]. The BIS used similar framing on the way out, saying it had "graduated out" of the project in October 2024 and denying political considerations after reports that Washington had lobbied it to leave ^[8]. Cointelegraph said it contacted the Saudi Central Bank and had no reply by publication ^[20].

What Riyadh has stepped back from is a production phase. Invoicing oil in a second currency needs a contract and a correspondent bank, and Saudi Arabia has already flirted with pricing some of its oil sales to China in yuan ^[18]; Iran and Russia use the currency to get around US sanctions ^[19]. The 1974 arrangement that started the petrodollar was itself an invoicing and surplus-recycling deal, under which Riyadh priced oil in dollars and put the proceeds into US assets ^[16]. Deutsche Bank put the causality this way in a March note: "The world saves in dollars in large part because it pays in dollars" ^[17].

In my view SAMA bought deniability, and bought it cheaply, because the 2024 US-China Economic and Security Review Commission report described mBridge as a system that could eventually settle payments for countries seeking to evade US sanctions ^[11]. mBridge reached minimum viable product and was handed to its participating central banks in October 2024, with then-general manager Agustin Carstens saying the BIS exit was not politically motivated ^[7], and the platform has since added Macau ^[13]. A Saudi return under another label would undercut that reading; so would volumes that keep compounding through the Gulf departures. Beijing's attention has partly moved on: in June the People's Bank of China research bureau's Wang Xin called for closer monitoring of stablecoins and central bank digital currencies in cross-border payments, and for more international coordination ^[21].