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The Atlantic Council published new research that categorizes and explains how the world's largest economies are regulating cryptocurrencies. It looks at 25 countries-G20 member countries, in addition to countries with the highest rates of cryptocurrency adoption including Iran, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Ukraine and Vietnam.  Each country is assigned one of three regulatory statuses: legal (where all activities are permitted), partial ban (where one or more activity is not permitted), and general ban (where all activity is limited). It breaks regulations down by tax policy, requirements to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, consumer protection rules, and licensing and disclosure obligations.

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Governor Felipe M. Medalla provided an update on Philippine payment system developments, including the BSP signifying interest in joining the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub's Project Nexus. Nexus seeks to connect multiple national payment systems into a cross-border platform that could enable international payments to happen as quickly as sending a text message.

According to Chainalysis, global crypto adoption has leveled off in the last year after growing consistently since mid-2019. Emerging markets dominate the index. Out of the top 20 ranked countries, ten are lower middle income (:Vietnam, Philippines, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Morocco, Nepal, Kenya, and Indonesia), eight are upper middle income (Brazil, Thailand, Russia, China, Turkey, Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador) and two are high income (United States and United Kingdom).

MoneyGram launched its stablecoin-powered payment channel, giving users the ability to send USD Coin (USDC) payments worldwide that can be withdrawn as cash by recipients. The service is being rolled out across several key remittance markets, including Canada, the United States, Kenya and the Philippines. Global cash-out functionality will be available by the end of June. To encourage adoption, the USDC transfer service will carry zero fees for the first 12 months. The new transfer service was built on the Stellar (XLM) blockchain and allows Stellar wallet users to send USDC to recipients around the world.

Despite phenomenal growth, current buy now, pay later (BNPL) models are showing to be rather unprofitable. Quinlan and Associates estimates that in Asia-Pacific (APAC), the largest BNPL firms, including Australia's Afterpay and Japan's Paidy, are currently running average profit margins of -15% per annum (p.a.), while the more nascent players operating in emerging markets like the Philippines' Cashalo and Indonesia's Akulaku are suffering from profit margins of -100% p.a. According to the analysis, APAC BNPL providers are struggling to reach profitability as costs relating to sales, marketing, funding, staff, technology, and credit losses eat into all their profits. Losses are even more pronounced for emerging market BNPL providers because of their stronger focus on long tail, unbanked/underbanked consumers, leading to much larger credit losses and funding costs. Quinlan and Associates identified three key pathways for them to become commercially viable: optimization, vertical integration and expansion.

The Governor of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) reportedly expects to put in place within the next two years a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC). However, blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) won't be used, which brings into question whether it is a "wholesale CBDC". Market convention defines a retail CBDC as being technology agnostic (it can be DLT-based or not), but it defines wholesale CBDC as being DLT-based. Otherwise, every non-DLT central bank-run digital payment system (e.g., real-time gross settlement systems) would be on the list of wholesale CBDC projects.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) remains lukewarm to the idea of issuing its own digital currency despite the decision of Facebook to unveil its own cryptocurrency, Libra.

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas approved rules allowing the creation and licensing of digital banks as a new bank category that is separate and distinct from the existing bank classifications.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has reportedly confirmed that it will not be exploring retail CBDC, instead focusing on wholesale CBDC to improve settlement times between banks. In April 2022 the BSP announced the start of its Project CBDCPh wholesale CBDC pilot program, with several leading financial institutions playing a part. On the retail payments front, the BSP has been focusing on drumming up support for private-sector digital payment rails, like they did with its recent "BSP Piso Caravan" program aimed at encouraging the public to replace their unfit banknotes and coins with digital cash.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) is moving ahead with a research project focused on central bank digital currency (CBDC). The BSP's  exploratory work started in 2021, focusing implications of CBDC for the whole financial system. A national payment system assessment was later conducted which resulted in the identification of relevant use cases of wholesale CBDC aimed at enhancing the payment system's safety, resiliency, and efficiency. As a next step, the BSP targets to roll-out Project CBDCPh aimed at building organizational capacity and hands-on knowledge of key aspects of CBDC that are relevant for a use case around addressing frictions in the national payment system.

The BIS Innovation Hub Singapore Centre and partners successfully connected the test versions of three established instant payment systems (IPS) using the Nexus model. The next phase of the project will work on the real-world potential of a multilateral network that could be scaled up across more countries. The year-long collaboration included the Bank of Italy, Central Bank of Malaysia (BNM) and Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). Test payments were initiated using only the mobile phone numbers or the recipients' company registration numbers via the Eurosystem's TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS), Malaysia's Real-time Retail Payments Platform (RPP) and Singapore's Fast and Secure Transfers (FAST) payment system. For the next phase of the project Bank Indonesia, BNM, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, MAS and the Bank of Thailand will leverage experiences from Phase I and Phase II of the project towards connecting their countries' IPS and facilitate cross-border transactions across a combined population of about 500 million people. Looking ahead, the BIS and the five central banks envisage that Nexus could eventually be implemented globally. To achieve this, they will aim to establish a Global Advisory Panel of central banks and payment system operators to advise on the project's development beyond the Southeast Asian region. The Bank of Italy and the European Central Bank will be invited to join this panel.

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) will reportedly complete its wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot that launched in September 2023, by the end of 2024. The BSP is testing out basic funds transfers between six participating banks, with plans to later test are higher value-adding services like securities settlement.