Desk

Payments

Value moved across borders and between institutions: corridors, correspondent chains, deposit tokens and the cost the existing rails charge.

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Coverage

Central bank money

Bank of China completes largest recorded mBridge transactions, including a HK$10bn payment

Bank of China settled the two largest transactions recorded on mBridge, the multi-central-bank digital currency platform, in June and July 2026.

5 days ago Bank for International Settlements 4 reports

Payments

Mastercard and Yellow Card partner on stablecoin payments across Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa

Mastercard and the African digital-asset platform Yellow Card announced a partnership on 7 May 2026 to build stablecoin-based payment and settlement rails across Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

7 May 2026 Mastercard newsroom 4 reports

Stablecoins Nigeria Kenya

Payments

JPMorgan issues its JPMD deposit token natively on the Canton Network

JPMorgan said on 7 January 2026 that it would issue JPMD, its dollar deposit token, natively on the Canton Network, a privacy-oriented institutional blockchain.

7 Jan 2026 J.P. Morgan 4 reports

Tokenized deposits United States Global

Analysis

Dollar access without dollar accounts

Receiving $200 in Sub-Saharan Africa cost 8.46% in the third quarter of 2025; the tokens undercutting that price are almost entirely dollar-denominated, and the flows are unmeasured.

25 July 2026

Concepts on this desk

Payment corridor economics

The cost structure of moving value between two specific countries, determined by liquidity prefunding, foreign exchange margin, compliance overhead and the density of cash-in and cash-out networks at each end.
Travel rule

Brussels attaches an identity file to a crypto transfer of any size while Washington still lets $2,999 move unnamed, and neither rule reaches the counterparty that never obtained a licence.

On the record

27 May 2026
Project Agorá prototype results published, with real-value testing to follow
29 September 2025
Swift says it will add a blockchain-based shared ledger to its infrastructure
5 June 2024
Project mBridge reaches minimum viable product stage
3 April 2024
BIS launches Project Agorá with seven central banks
14 December 2023
First sterling payments settle on the Fnality Payment System
7 August 2023
PayPal launches the PYUSD dollar stablecoin
10 June 2022
MoneyGram opens USDC cash-in, cash-out network on Stellar
23 February 2021
China and the UAE join the multiple CBDC bridge project with Hong Kong and Thailand

Full timeline →

Payments

Coverage

Bank of China completes largest recorded mBridge transactions, including a HK$10bn payment

Mastercard and Yellow Card partner on stablecoin payments across Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa

JPMorgan issues its JPMD deposit token natively on the Canton Network

Analysis

Dollar access without dollar accounts

The weekly read on onchain market economics