New Delhi, April 2 -- The West Asia escalation has brought back into focus a structural vulnerability that has long remained underappreciated in policy discourse. Energy flows translate into payment flows, and both are now increasingly mediated by financial architectures that reflect geopolitical reality as much as economic logic. These are not passive conduits, as they can shape outcomes-by enabling, delaying or, in extreme cases, constraining the movement of money across borders.

At the heart of this evolving dynamic lies mBridge, an initiative incubated under the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) for interoperability among multiple central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The BIS left the project in 2024.

What began as a techn...