On 23 October the Monetary Authority of Singapore announced that Bank Negara Malaysia and Bank of Thailand had joined BLOOM as policymaker members. BLOOM stands for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency, and it is a public-private initiative born in October 2025 from the ashes of Project Orchid, the programme with which Singapore had been exploring the digital dollar since 2021. It is not yet another pilot: it is the acknowledgement that the problem to solve is not issuing tokenised money, but making it travel between jurisdictions that do not share the same rules.

The problem nobody wants to pay for

MAS’s stated goal is to cut costs by removing the need for a bilateral agreement for each individual market. The hard part is not the transfer, it is the bargaining: every pair of jurisdictions requires its own terms, controls and liabilities, and the result is a web of private arrangements that nobody can scale.

BLOOM works on three areas: how institutions accept different forms of digital money and settle transactions between markets with different local requirements; how separate systems become interoperable; and programmable controls, meaning identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction limits. The roster of participants includes Airwallex, Mastercard, Ripple, Visa and the World Bank Group among the newcomers, alongside Circle, Coinbase, DBS, J.P. Morgan, Partior, Standard Chartered, Stripe, Temasek and UOB.

Two central banks, two different interests

For Malaysia this is not a debut: in February Bank Negara had announced three initiatives to experiment with ringgit stablecoins and tokenised deposits in wholesale payments, domestic and cross-border, during 2026. Deputy governor Aznan bin Abdul Aziz said that cross-border payments with different forms of digital money are becoming a concrete proposition.

For Thailand the tone is more cautious. Daranee Saeju, deputy governor for payment systems stability, spoke of the need to inform forward-looking regulatory approaches “while maintaining prudent, proportionate and risk-responsive oversight”. That is the formula with which a central bank says yes to experimentation and no to the idea that it is already convinced.

Programmable controls, and agents that pay

The third area is where it gets decided whether this infrastructure will be public or private in practice. Verified identity, filtered sanctions and spending limits written into the protocol are exactly what you need to let an autonomous agent pay: according to Cointelegraph’s account, BLOOM’s perimeter also includes payments executed by AI agents within predefined limits. If a program is to be able to spend, someone has to be able to stop it — and that someone, in a system like this, is the code.

Meanwhile the crypto market is not celebrating: Bitcoin closed the week just above $80,000, with the 50-day moving average around $81,700.

The contrast is worth looking at: three central banks are building common rules to move digital money between countries, while other products package bitcoin inside an ETF and distribute it in place of a dividend. The first path turns digital money into infrastructure, the second into a by-product of an allocation.

Verified sources: MAS, press release “MAS, Bank Negara Malaysia and Bank of Thailand Partner with Industry to Advance Cross-Border Settlement in Digital Money through BLOOM”, mas.gov.sg, 23/10/2026 (joining as policymaker members, three areas of work, list of participants, statements by Aznan bin Abdul Aziz and Daranee Saeju); CoinMarketCap Academy, “Malaysia, Thailand Central Banks Join Singapore’s BLOOM Push”, 23/10/2026 (the three Malaysian initiatives announced in February on ringgit stablecoins and tokenised deposits); Coin360, “Malaysia, Thailand Join Singapore BLOOM Initiative”, 23/10/2026 (date of 23/10, interoperability goals); Bloomingbit, 23/10/2026 (launch of BLOOM in October 2025 out of Project Orchid, the goal of cutting costs without bilateral agreements, payments by AI agents within predefined limits according to Cointelegraph); Cointelegraph, 23/10/2026 and Perplexity Finance, reading of 25/10/2026 (BTC just above $80,000, 50-day average around $81,700, ETF outflows); etf.net, “Franklin ETFs that turn stock dividends into bitcoin go effective Oct. 27 and have not started trading”, 23/10/2026, and Tangem News, 23/10/2026 (FBEQ and FIBT, 95% equities and 5% bitcoin at launch, 20% cap, rebalancing at 4.5%, listing not yet started). Discrepancies noted: Echo’s report presented the Franklin ETFs as already approved for listing; the prospectuses become effective on 27/10 and trading has not begun, so the draft does not speak of listed ETFs. The detail on payments by AI agents is attributed to Cointelegraph and not to the MAS release, which speaks only of “programmable controls”. The news of the OCC final rule on stablecoins was excluded because it was already covered in the 22/10 draft.