Project Mandala

Project Mandala is a BIS (Bank for International Settlements) Innovation Hub Singapore Centre collaboration with the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Bank of Korea, Bank Negara Malaysia, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, demonstrating that regulatory and policy compliance for cross-border transactions can be embedded directly into transaction protocols rather than checked after the fact. For a tokenisation operator, Mandala is the worked example of "compliance by design": programmable compliance logic built into smart contracts so that a cross-border transfer carries its regulatory checks with it rather than routing through a separate post-hoc compliance layer.

What it is

The project reached proof-of-concept stage and was completed with a joint announcement in October 2024 (BIS press release). It addresses a specific pain point in cross-border payments, since each jurisdiction in a transaction chain enforces its own regulatory and policy requirements (sanctions screening, capital-flow management, data residency), and conventional cross-border rails check compliance at each hop rather than encoding it once. Mandala’s design embeds those checks into the transaction protocol itself, aligning with the G20’s cross-border payments priority actions on cost and speed without weakening regulatory integrity.

Relevance to tokenisation

Mandala is Australia’s most direct BIS Innovation Hub participation on tokenised cross-border settlement, distinct from Project Mariana (Banque de France, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the Swiss National Bank, with no Australian central bank participant) and separate from Project Acacia, the RBA’s domestic wholesale-settlement pilot. Where Acacia tests settlement-asset design inside Australia, Mandala tests compliance-embedding logic across the RBA, Bank of Korea, Bank Negara Malaysia and MAS jurisdictions.