Maybank's ringgit tokenised-deposit pilot turns Malaysia's digital-money debate into a named wholesale test

Maybank's February 11, 2026 ringgit tokenised-deposit pilot under BNM's DAIH, framed as a supervised wholesale cross-border payments test rather than a generic blockchain announcement.

Maybank's February 11 announcement moves Malaysia's tokenised-deposit discussion from policy exploration into a named bank pilot with a stated payments use case.

The bank identified the money form (ringgit tokenised deposits), the operating problem (cross-border payments involving other ASEAN deposit tokens), the technical rail (its permissioned blockchain), the supervisory setting (Bank Negara Malaysia's Digital Asset Innovation Hub), and a first participant (Yinson).

It is not enough to claim production deployment, settled cross-border legal treatment, or a completed model for reserve, redemption, FX, or interbank finality.

The February 11 announcement matters less as a generic blockchain story than as a supervised Bank Negara Malaysia use case for ringgit tokenised deposits, cross-border payment flows, and ASEAN deposit-token interoperability on a permissioned bank rail.