When Andréa Maechler asked ‘what makes money, money?‘ at the Point Zero Forum in June, the Bank for International Settlements was not opening a debate. It was closing one. Moneyness, Maechler argued, is the capacity to settle at par, at scale, with no questions asked, and it is earned through architecture rather than asserted through code.
Her test for whether any new instrument can climb the moneyness spectrum rests on four Rs: reserves, redemption, regulation and rails. The first three, she conceded, are tractable problems for stablecoin issuers. Rails are the binding constraint, because permissionless networks resist the governance and accountability that settlement finality demands.
The striking thing about this framework is how little it now divides Basel from Beijing. China’s decision in January to remake the digital renminbi as an interest-bearing, bank-intermediated deposit instrument, conceded the BIS’s definitional case before Maechler made it: sovereign anchoring and two-tier intermediation won, digital cash lost. The June speech and the January reform are two announcements of the same verdict. What remains contested is not the nature of tokenised money but the ownership of the infrastructure beneath it, and here the two sides are building against each other.
Same money, rival railways
The BIS’s rail is Project Agorá, run with seven central banks representing the major reserve currencies, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan, with the Bank of Canada joining as the project advances to real-value testing. Its defining feature is conservatism: tokenised commercial bank deposits settle in tokenised central bank reserves on a unified ledger, but correspondent banking survives intact, keeping commercial banks and their compliance apparatus inside every cross-border transaction.
China’s rail is Project mBridge, which does the opposite. Wholesale central bank money from five jurisdictions sits directly on a shared ledger and correspondent banking is bypassed entirely. The BIS incubated mBridge, then exited in October 2024 and redirected its energy to Agorá. Since the handover, activity has only accelerated: cumulative settlement has climbed to roughly $69bn from the $55bn the Atlantic Council recorded last November, about 95% of it in digital renminbi. Whatever its formal multilateral governance, mBridge is functionally a renminbi corridor.
The fate of correspondent banking is an important distinction in one respect: correspondent banks are where sanctions screening and anti-money-laundering enforcement actually happen, so a rail that dispenses with them removes the layer through which the existing monetary order polices cross-border payments. It is not a meaningful distinction for the moneyness of the tokens, because both rails settle in central bank money, at par and with finality, on permissioned ledgers that sovereigns control. Correspondent banks were never the source of those properties, only the intermediaries through which they travelled.
China’s two digital renminbis are drifting apart
Less noticed is that China’s domestic redesign is quietly pulling against its own international rail. The digital renminbi that circulates on mBridge and the digital renminbi in retail wallets share a name and a par value, but since January they are not even the same class of claim, and the difference is architectural rather than cosmetic.
At home, the digital renminbi is now, by Beijing’s own account, a deposit liability of the distributing commercial banks: it is recorded on centralised infrastructure that the People’s Bank of China designs and operates, while the banks onboard customers, operate wallets, pay interest and screen transactions. Every balance sits inside one administrative hierarchy, which is precisely what allows deposit-like features to attach to it.
On mBridge, the People Bank of China’s Digital Currency Institute issues wholesale digital renminbi natively onto a shared ledger that the participating central banks validate jointly, each operating its own node. Commercial participants exchange those tokens directly, settlement is final when the ledger updates, and each currency enters and leaves the platform only through issuance and redemption gateways run by its home central bank. One instantiation is bank money inside a single sovereign’s system; the other is central bank money in bearer-style form, whose validity is established collectively.
The January reform widens the gap between these two instantiations. Interest accrual and balance-sheet integration are ledger-bound attributes, administered where the account relationship lives; a settlement token on a shared multilateral ledger cannot easily carry them. The more deposit-like the domestic digital renminbi becomes, the less it resembles the asset mBridge was designed around. China, in effect, now operates Agorá’s model at home while sponsoring its architectural rival abroad.
An argument about power, not money
Apply Maechler’s own test symmetrically and an uncomfortable conclusion follows. The objection to mBridge cannot be architectural. A permissioned, sovereign-anchored, centrally validated network passes the rails criterion by construction; on the BIS’s framework, wholesale digital renminbi is a high-moneyness instrument. The objection is jurisdictional: whose law governs the ledger, whose sanctions reach it and whose central bank sits at the anchor. That is a perfectly legitimate concern, but it is a different concern from the one the moneyness framework was built to address. Conflating the two flatters the position of the incumbent reserve currencies more than it should.
The distinction matters most for the emerging market policy-makers who are the real audience for both projects. Maechler warned of ‘stablecoin dollarisation’ – the erosion of monetary sovereignty when dollar-pegged private tokens colonise weak-currency economies. The mirror image went unnamed in Zurich. An economy that settles its trade on mBridge in wholesale digital renminbi accepts a parallel dependence, with the PBoC rather than a private issuer at the anchor, and with the added feature that the anchor sovereign is also, in most cases, the economy’s largest trading partner.
For central banks in Jakarta, Nairobi or Riyadh, the choice on offer is not between sound and unsound money, nor between innovation and incumbency. It is between two versions of the same two-tier tokenised architecture, distinguished only by the sovereign underneath. The BIS has won the argument about what money is. It should now say plainly that the remaining argument is about power, because its emerging market members will make their choices on exactly that basis.
Kun Tian is a Senior Lecturer at Kent Business School, University of Kent.
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