Skip to content
Wiki
HOME / JURISDICTIONS / Singapore
Jurisdictional snapshot · APAC
Updated 2026-07-30

Singapore

Industry-pilot heavy, narrow stablecoin perimeter, deliberate cross-border infrastructure leadership.

Catch up on Singapore→

Recent developments

9 on file

Key institutions

OcbcMarketnodeDigiFT

Singapore is the APAC jurisdiction other regulators benchmark against on tokenisation. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) holds an unusually wide remit (central bank, banking supervisor, securities regulator, payments licensor, and investment promoter in one) and uses it to run parallel programmes covering wholesale CBDC, purpose-bound money, asset tokenisation industry pilots, single-currency stablecoin licensing, and a deliberately extraterritorial digital-asset service licensing regime. The posture is pilot-heavy and perimeter-narrow: channel innovation through industry workstreams MAS can observe directly, then formalise in narrowly-scoped licensing once the operational shape is clear. Singapore differentiates from Hong Kong on stablecoin scope (single-currency only), from Tokyo on the speed of public-private workstreams, and from London on the appetite to host shared-ledger infrastructure with global commercial banks.

Regulatory posture

MAS is the single lead. Unlike Hong Kong's HKMA/SFC split or Japan's FSA/BoJ split, MAS owns wholesale and retail, banks and asset managers, payments and securities. The practical consequence is that tokenisation programmes can move quickly through internal coordination without inter-agency negotiation, but the same agency carries the political risk if one workstream errs.

The doctrinal frame is "regulate the activity, not the technology". MAS has avoided creating a standalone tokenisation regime in favour of fitting tokenised products into existing perimeters: the Securities and Futures Act for tokenised securities, the Payment Services Act for digital payment tokens, and the Single-Currency Stablecoin framework (gazetted August 2023) for stablecoin issuance. The Digital Token Service Provider regime under the FSM Act extends MAS's reach to Singapore-incorporated entities serving non-Singapore customers, an unusually expansive jurisdictional move.

Active pilots and frameworks

  • Project Guardian. MAS-led industry workstreams umbrella, launched 2022, with cohorts covering tokenised funds, FX-DvP (delivery-versus-payment), tokenised bonds, and tokenised wealth management. Recent outputs include the ISDA / Ant International report on FX with tokenised bank liabilities (3 July 2025) and the ICMA Fixed Income workstream addendum (November 2025). Distinct from Hong Kong's Project Ensemble: Guardian is a private-sector workstream umbrella, Ensemble a regulator-operated settlement layer.
  • Global Layer One (GL1). Shared institutional ledger initiative. Phase 1 closed in November 2025 with the 108-control GL1 Toolkit, named participation from BNY, Citi, JPMorgan, MUFG and Société Générale-FORGE, and a planned non-profit GL1 Org as the Phase 2 governance vehicle.
  • Project Orchid. Purpose-bound money pilot, foundation for any future Singapore retail CBDC. Currently the working architecture for programmable government disbursement and conditional payment use cases.
  • Tokenised MAS bills trial 2026. Announced at SFF 2025; pulls Singapore into the small set of central banks that have committed to tokenised wholesale-bill issuance trials.
  • MAS Single-Currency Stablecoin framework. Issuers regulated as Major Payment Institutions under the PSA, restricted to SGD or any G10 currency, with bank-grade reserve and capital requirements. The framework moves into operational issuer licensing mid-2026.
  • DTSP regime. FSM Act extension giving MAS extraterritorial reach over Singapore-incorporated digital token service providers serving non-Singapore customers. The most-discussed compliance question in the regional crypto industry through 2025-2026.

Open questions

  • Whether MAS plans to publish a formal SCS authorisation list, or continue to let issuers self-attest under the framework.
  • Whether the DTSP regime's extraterritorial reach will produce enforcement action in 2026, or remain a paper deterrent.
  • The exact governance shape of GL1 once it scales beyond the founding banks. Operating model is not public.
  • Whether any Project Guardian workstream graduates into a standalone production regime in the next 12 months, mirroring Hong Kong's Ensemble trajectory.