Singapore is the APAC jurisdiction other regulators benchmark against on tokenisation. Monetary Authority of Singapore holds an unusually wide remit (central bank, banking supervisor, securities regulator, payments licensor, investment promotion in one), and uses it to run a parallel set of 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 operating posture is pilot-heavy and perimeter-narrow: Singapore prefers to channel innovation through industry workstreams it can observe directly, then formalise in narrowly-scoped licensing once the operational shape is clear. For a product team picking a jurisdiction, Singapore differentiates from Hong Kong on stablecoin scope (single-currency only, much narrower than the HK regime), from Tokyo on 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. Multiple cohorts covering tokenised funds, FX-DvP, 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) with two new pieces of operational guidance for tokenised-bond DvP and custody. Distinct from Hong Kong's Project Ensemble: Guardian is a private-sector workstream umbrella; Ensemble is a single regulator-operated wholesale settlement layer.
• Global Layer One (GL1). Shared institutional ledger infrastructure initiative. Phase 1 closed at the Singapore Fintech Festival in November 2025 with publication of a 108-control GL1 Toolkit aligned with global regulatory principles, named participation from BNY, Citi, JPMorgan, MUFG, Société Générale-FORGE, observer roles for the European Central Bank, Banque de France, and IMF, and the planned creation of a 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. Bank-grade reserve and capital requirements layered on top of MPI. 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.

Key institutions

• MAS. Lead on every tokenisation workstream. Owns the perimeter end to end.
• DBS. Most active local bank on tokenisation. DBS Digital Exchange operates a regulated venue for tokenised securities. Founding member of Partior.
• OCBC and UOB. Active on Project Guardian workstreams and on tokenised trade finance.
• Partior. Singapore-headquartered interbank tokenised-deposit settlement network. Founded 2021 as a JV between DBS, JPMorgan, and Standard Chartered, with later investors including Temasek, Deutsche Bank, Peak XV Partners, Jump Trading Group, and Valor Capital Group. Built on ConsenSys Quorum lineage. Singapore is its operating base and Partior often features in MAS workstreams.
• SGX Group. Less visible on tokenisation than HKEX, but the venue for tokenised securities trading and the institutional CSD context for any future tokenised primary issuance.

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.