BNM Bets on Blockchain: Malaysia’s 3-Year Tokenisation Roadmap and Its First Ringgit Stablecoin Pilots
Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) has laid out a three-year roadmap (2025–2027) to bring asset tokenisation into the national financial system — and it is no longer just theory. As of mid-September 2026, the central bank’s Digital Asset Innovation Hub (DAIH) has moved its first cohort of pilots into the regulatory sandbox, testing ringgit-pegged stablecoins and tokenised bank deposits with some of the country’s largest financial institutions.
The message from BNM is deliberate: this is about real-world assets and settlement efficiency, not speculative cryptocurrency.
What’s actually being tested
Three initiatives have been onboarded to the sandbox, each targeting a wholesale use case rather than retail trading:
- Ringgit stablecoin for B2B settlement — a pilot involving Standard Chartered Bank Malaysia and Capital A, exploring a ringgit-pegged stablecoin for business-to-business payments.
- Tokenised deposits for payments — pilots led by Maybank and CIMB, testing bank deposits issued and moved on a blockchain rail.
The common thread is wholesale payments and settlement — domestic and cross-border — plus the settlement of tokenised assets. These are institutional plumbing experiments, aimed at making large-value transfers faster and cheaper, not at putting a coin in consumers’ wallets.
Why BNM is doing this
The roadmap frames tokenisation as a tool to solve concrete economic problems, not to chase a trend. BNM has pointed to three motivations in particular:
- The SME financing gap — using tokenisation to unlock new forms of collateral and financing for smaller businesses.
- Islamic finance — exploring how blockchain-based structures can support Shariah-compliant instruments.
- Payments and settlement — cutting friction and cost in interbank and cross-border flows.
Crucially, BNM has said the pilots will let it assess the implications for monetary and financial stability before writing rules. The 2026 phase is explicitly about proof-of-concept and pilot testing — identifying what works before anything is scaled.
The timeline that matters
- June 2025 — DAIH established.
- 2025–2027 — the tokenisation roadmap window.
- September 2026 — first sandbox pilots go live with named institutions.
- End of 2026 — BNM intends to provide greater policy clarity on ringgit stablecoins and tokenised deposits.
BNM has also signalled that this work could become a precursor to a wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) — the settlement layer that a tokenised financial system would ultimately need.
What it means for the payments industry
For Malaysia’s fast-growing payments sector, tokenised deposits and a regulated ringgit stablecoin could eventually sit underneath the consumer rails people already use — DuitNow, cards, e-wallets — speeding up the wholesale settlement that happens behind the scenes.
For now, nothing changes at the point of sale. But the direction of travel is clear: BNM wants Malaysia’s institutions experimenting inside a supervised sandbox rather than being caught flat-footed by stablecoins built offshore. By the end of 2026, the industry should have its first real read on how far the central bank is willing to go.
FinDeskAsia will track each pilot as BNM publishes results. This is a developing regulatory story.
