RECRYP01What Nexus connects
Project Nexus connects domestic instant-payment systems — the retail rails ordinary people already use for everyday payments, like India's UPI or Singapore's PayNow. It doesn't touch CBDCs at all. The idea is standardization: instead of every pair of countries building a bespoke bilateral link between their instant-payment systems (which is how these connections get built today, one slow bilateral integration at a time), a participating instant-payment system integrates with Nexus once and gains access to every other connected country.
India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand incorporated the effort as Nexus Global Payments in Singapore in 2025, with Indonesia joining as a special observer. BIS estimates the initial network could eventually reach 1.7 billion people. It's targeting live implementation in 2026.
02What mBridge connects
mBridge connects wholesale central bank digital currencies directly — it's a settlement platform for central banks and their commercial banks to move value between sovereign digital currencies without a correspondent chain. It has nothing to do with retail instant-payment rails. Where Nexus is about a consumer in one country paying a person or merchant in another almost as easily as a domestic payment, mBridge is about interbank settlement in tokenized CBDC. See our full mBridge explainer for how that platform's governance actually played out.
03Side by side
| Project Nexus | mBridge | |
|---|---|---|
| Connects | Domestic instant-payment systems | Wholesale CBDCs directly |
| Typical user | Retail consumers, sending person-to-person or to merchants | Banks, settling interbank |
| Coordinator | Nexus Global Payments (Singapore, inc. 2025) | Founding central banks (BIS withdrew 2024) |
| Founding members | India, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand | China, Hong Kong, Thailand, UAE, Saudi Arabia |
| Status, 2026 | Targeting live implementation | Live, ~$55.5B processed |
04Why they get conflated
Both projects sit under the general banner of "BIS-adjacent cross-border payment interoperability," both were incubated at the BIS Innovation Hub, and both are frequently cited as evidence that "central banks are solving cross-border payments." That framing isn't wrong, but it flattens a real distinction: retail instant-payment linking and wholesale CBDC settlement are different engineering problems, with different participants, different risk profiles, and — as mBridge's governance history shows — different neutrality challenges.
05What it means if you're building on either
If you're a fintech building a remittance or consumer payment product, Nexus-style instant-payment linking is the more directly relevant infrastructure — it's closer to the rails your product already touches. If you're a central bank, commercial bank, or trade business that needs to move value denominated in a specific sovereign digital currency across a border, wholesale CBDC settlement — the mBridge category — is the relevant layer, and it's the layer Recryp is built for.
The two aren't mutually exclusive in a real stack: a payment could plausibly originate on a Nexus-style instant-payment rail and settle underneath on CBDC-denominated infrastructure. See how we frame this for fintechs and neobanks specifically.
Recryp is not affiliated with, and does not participate in, Project Nexus, Nexus Global Payments, mBridge, or any BIS Innovation Hub initiative. This explainer draws on public BIS, MAS, and Bank Negara Malaysia statements, cited as market context.