Singapore to trial tokenised bills, bring in stablecoin laws, central bank chief says

Singapore’s central bank will hold trials to issue tokenised MAS bills next year and bring in laws to regulate stablecoins as it presses forward with plans to build a scalable and secure tokenised financial ecosystem, the bank’s top official said on Thursday.

“Tokenisation has lifted off the ground. But have asset-backed tokens achieved escape velocity? Not yet,” said Chia Der Jiun, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), a keynote address at the Singapore FinTech Festival.

He said MAS has been working on the details of its stablecoin regulatory regime and will prepare draft legislation, with the emphasis on “sound reserve backing and redemption reliability.”

MAS is also supporting trials under the BLOOM initiative, which explores the use of tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins for settlement, he added.

“In the CBDC space, I am pleased to announce that the three Singapore banks, DBS, OCBC, and UOB, have successfully conducted interbank overnight lending transactions using the first live trial issuance of Singapore dollar wholesale CBDC,” he said.

A CBDC, or central bank digital currency, is a digital form of central bank money.

MAS will expand trials to include tokenised MAS bills settled with CBDC, he added.

Chia said a regulatory guide on tokenised capital markets products will be published this week, and MAS is working with international counterparts to align standards and support adoption.

On Thursday, MAS also announced agreements to work with other central banks on cross-border transactions and digital assets.

It said it would collaborate with the Bank of England and the Bank of Thailand to conduct experiments that could enable real-time foreign exchange transactions that are fast, secure and interoperable across different systems.

The central bank also signed a memorandum of understanding with Deutsche Bundesbank to collaborate on cross-border digital asset settlement.

The partnership is built on an initiative designed to enhance the liquidity and efficiency of financial markets through asset tokenisation, it said.