Most countries built real-time payment rails on top of decades-old batch infrastructure, layering instant settlement over systems originally designed for overnight netting. Cambodia didn't have that legacy to work around â and its central bank used the opportunity to build something structurally different: a blockchain-based interbank system, launched in 2020, that settles both of the country's circulating currencies in real time from day one. Understanding Bakong means understanding that it isn't a retail overlay on an older wholesale system; it effectively is the wholesale and retail system.
The short version
Cambodia's payment infrastructure is centered almost entirely on the National Bank of Cambodia (NBC):
- Bakong â the NBC's blockchain-based national payment system, launched October 2020, providing real-time interbank settlement in both Khmer riel (KHR) and US dollars.
- KHQR â Cambodia's standardized, EMV-based merchant QR code, introduced in 2022, which runs on top of Bakong rather than being a separate payment rail.
- FAST and CSS (Cambodian Shared Switch) â the legacy pre-Bakong interbank transfer and card-clearing systems, which Bakong was designed to preserve compatibility with during the transition rather than replace overnight.
Bakong â real-time, dual-currency, and built on distributed ledger technology
Bakong is genuinely unusual among the systems covered in this content cluster: rather than a conventional centralized RTGS database, it runs on Hyperledger Iroha, a permissioned distributed ledger technology platform, developed in partnership with Japanese fintech firm Soramitsu. The NBC has been explicit that Bakong is not a central bank digital currency â it's a tokenized deposit platform, where digital balances are fully backed by cash held in participants' traditional bank accounts â but functionally it operates as the country's real-time gross settlement layer for both retail and interbank activity.
- Settlement type: Real-time gross settlement, individually processed via DLT, open API-based
- Speed: Under five seconds, with system throughput exceeding 2,000 transactions per second
- Value tier: No specific low/high value segmentation the way most other markets structure their rails â Bakong is built to carry P2P transfers, merchant payments, and interbank settlement on the same real-time infrastructure
- Currencies: Both Khmer riel and US dollars natively â a deliberate design choice given Cambodia's historically dollarized economy, and part of the NBC's broader strategy to increase riel usage
- What it's used for: P2P transfers, merchant payments via KHQR, government payment processes including tax collection, and increasingly, cross-border QR payments with Thailand, Singapore, and (in pipeline) Vietnam
In 2024 alone, Bakong processed over 600 million transactions, moving nearly USD 46 billion in riel and over USD 104 billion in US dollars â a combined monetary volume equivalent to roughly 330% of Cambodia's GDP, underscoring how central the system has become to the national economy in just four years.
KHQR â the merchant QR standard riding on Bakong
KHQR is Cambodia's unified, EMV-standard QR code, introduced by the NBC in July 2022 to fix a fragmented landscape where different banks and wallets each ran proprietary QR formats. A single KHQR code, displayed by any merchant, can be scanned and paid by any participating bank or e-wallet connected to Bakong â the same "one QR, any provider" model seen in VietQR, DuitNow QR, and Thai QR, but here explicitly built as a front end onto Bakong's real-time settlement rather than a separate scheme. By 2026, KHQR had reached over 1.5 million merchants across the country.
FAST and CSS â what Bakong was built to preserve compatibility with
Before Bakong, Cambodian interbank transfers ran through FAST (a conventional interbank transfer system) and the Cambodian Shared Switch (CSS), which handled card-based clearing. Rather than forcing an abrupt migration, Bakong was designed to preserve most of the existing FAST feature set while modernizing the underlying settlement mechanism â meaning banks and payment service providers could connect to Bakong's open APIs without discarding their existing FAST/CSS integrations outright. CSS continues to play a role in clearing card-based transactions alongside Bakong's account-to-account rail.
Comparison at a glance
| System | Operator | Settlement | Speed | Currencies | Typical use |
|---|
| Bakong | National Bank of Cambodia | Real-time gross settlement (DLT-based) | Under 5 seconds, 24/7 | KHR, USD | P2P transfers, merchant payments, interbank settlement, government payments |
| KHQR | NBC (via Bakong) | Same as Bakong | Same as Bakong | KHR, USD | Unified merchant QR acceptance |
| FAST / CSS | NBC / legacy operators | Legacy interbank transfer and card clearing | Predates Bakong's real-time model | KHR, USD | Legacy card clearing (CSS); largely absorbed by Bakong for transfers |
What this means if you're moving money in and out of Cambodia
For virtually all commercial payment activity â collecting from Cambodian customers, paying local suppliers, running interbank transfers â Bakong is the rail, full stop. There isn't a separate high-value RTGS system layered on top the way most other markets in this content cluster have; Bakong itself handles both retail volume and larger interbank settlement in real time. The dual-currency design also means a payment provider operating in Cambodia needs to handle both KHR and USD natively, since Bakong treats them as parallel rails rather than requiring conversion at the point of transfer.
Cambodia's cross-border QR linkages â live with Thailand and Singapore, with Vietnam in progress â are also worth tracking, since they extend Bakong-based real-time settlement beyond Cambodia's own borders for travel and trade use cases.
