RECRYP
Reference
The interoperability glossary.
Nineteen terms this whole space runs on, defined once, without circular jargon. If a term used elsewhere on this site is unfamiliar, it's probably here.
- CBDC central bank digital currency
- A digital form of a sovereign currency issued and backed directly by that country's central bank — distinct from commercial-bank money (what's in your bank account today) and from private stablecoins.
- Retail CBDC
- A CBDC available for general public use — held and spent by individuals and businesses, usually distributed through licensed banks or payment providers rather than directly by the central bank. The UAE's Digital Dirham and India's e₹ are both retail CBDCs.
- Wholesale CBDC wCBDC
- A CBDC restricted to use between financial institutions and the central bank, typically for interbank settlement rather than public payments. Several mCBDC arrangements, including mBridge, are wholesale-only.
- mCBDC arrangement multi-CBDC
- Infrastructure or a platform connecting two or more central banks' digital currencies so they can be used for cross-border payment or settlement. mBridge is the best-known live example.
- Regulated stablecoin
- A privately issued digital token pegged to a fiat currency (usually 1:1) under a specific regulatory framework — distinct from a CBDC, which is sovereign-issued, and from unregulated or algorithmic stablecoins.
- Correspondent banking
- The system where banks without a direct relationship route a cross-border payment through one or more intermediary ("correspondent") banks that hold relationships with both parties. It's the dominant model for cross-border payments today, and the source of the delay and cost CBDC interoperability is trying to solve.
- Nostro / vostro account
- Accounts banks hold with each other to run correspondent banking. A "nostro" account is what a bank holds in a foreign currency at another bank; the same account is that other bank's "vostro" account. Cross-border payments require these accounts to be pre-funded, tying up capital that would otherwise be deployed elsewhere.
- ISO 20022
- An international standard for financial messaging that carries far richer, structured data than its legacy predecessors — remittance information, structured addresses, more precise identifiers. SWIFT completed migrating core cross-border payment messages to ISO 20022's MX format on 22 November 2025.
- MT message / MX message
- MT ("Message Type") is SWIFT's legacy financial messaging format, in use since the 1970s. MX is the ISO 20022-based format replacing it. SWIFT's November 2025 migration moved core cross-border FI payment traffic (MT102, MT103, MT201, MT203) from MT to MX.
- PvP settlement payment-versus-payment
- A settlement mechanism ensuring both legs of a foreign-exchange transaction complete simultaneously, or neither does — eliminating the risk that one party pays out and the other fails to deliver its side.
- Atomic settlement
- A transaction that either completes in full or doesn't happen at all, with no partial or intermediate state — removing the risk of a payment being "stuck in transit" partway through a multi-leg chain.
- Settlement risk Herstatt risk
- The risk that one party in a transaction pays out before confirming the counterparty has paid its side, and the counterparty then fails to deliver. Named after Herstatt Bank's 1974 collapse mid-settlement, which crystallized the risk for regulators.
- Travel Rule
- A regulatory requirement — originating in traditional wire-transfer rules, extended to virtual assets by the Financial Action Task Force — that payment originator and beneficiary information travels with a transaction for sanctions and anti-money-laundering screening.
- mBridge
- A multi-CBDC settlement platform coordinated by the BIS Innovation Hub from 2021, reaching minimum-viable-product stage in mid-2024. BIS withdrew in late 2024, citing an inability to support the project's expanding, sanctions-exposed membership; the People's Bank of China, Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Bank of Thailand, Central Bank of the UAE, and Saudi Arabia's SAMA continue operating it independently. See our full explainer.
- Project Nexus
- A BIS Innovation Hub initiative connecting domestic instant-payment systems — not CBDCs — across countries. Incorporated as Nexus Global Payments in Singapore in 2025, with India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand as founding members. See how it differs from a CBDC bridge.
- Project Agorá
- A BIS-convened project launched in 2024 with seven G7-aligned central banks and more than 40 private financial institutions — including JPMorgan, Citi, HSBC, and SWIFT — exploring tokenized commercial-bank deposits and wholesale CBDC on a unified programmable platform. Launched the same year BIS withdrew from mBridge.
- BIS Bank for International Settlements / BIS Innovation Hub
- An organization owned by central banks that acts as a bank for central banks and a forum for monetary and financial cooperation. Its Innovation Hub runs experimental projects — mBridge, Nexus, and Agorá among them — exploring the future of money and payments.
- Interoperability layer
- Infrastructure that lets otherwise-incompatible systems — here, different sovereigns' CBDC rails — exchange value or information directly, without each pair of systems building a custom bilateral connection from scratch. This is the category of infrastructure Recryp builds.
- Correspondent chain
- The sequence of intermediary banks a cross-border payment passes through under correspondent banking — commonly three to five hops, each one adding delay, a fee, and a compliance checkpoint.
Want the deeper version of any of these?
The explainers in the Insights hub go further on mBridge, Nexus, ISO 20022, and the UAE-India corridor specifically.