SINGAPORE Law and Practice Contributed by: Tju Liang Chua and Ulanda Oon, Drew & Napier LLC
1. Overview of Blockchain and Crypto- Assets 1.1 Blockchain 1.1.1 Evolution of Uses of Blockchain Singapore has built upon its strengths as a global financial centre to become a leading global blockchain hub. It is home to a healthy blockchain ecosystem, comprising numerous players at the forefront of trends in areas such as asset tokenisation, cryptocurrency trading and custody, supply chain, insurance, digital identity and mobility. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has driven much of this momentum through flagship initiatives such as Project Guardian – under which financial institutions (FIs) have piloted asset tokenisation use cases for fixed income, foreign exchange and wealth management – and the Global Layer 1 (GL1) initiative, which seeks to develop an interoperable, regulatorily- compliant shared-ledger infrastructure for cross-bor- der use in financial markets. Banks including DBS, OCBC and UOB have completed interbank overnight lending transactions using a Singapore-dollar whole- sale central bank digital currency (CBDC), and MAS has announced plans to pilot tokenised MAS Bills set- tled through that wholesale CBDC. To support the tokenisation wave, MAS also launched the BLOOM (Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi- currency) initiative in October 2025, to support indus- try experimentation with tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins for settlement. These public-sector initiatives sit alongside a broad spectrum of private-sector adoption. The use of blockchain in Singapore runs the full gamut of public to private enterprises, including the following. • Government registers for non-profit purposes – eg, OpenCerts, which allows employers to verify academic certificates from Singapore’s universities and higher learning institutions. • Interoperable digital utilities for global trade – eg, TradeTrust, an IMDA-led open-source framework, allows secure, MLETR-compliant exchange and verification of electronic bills of lading across plat- forms. By early 2026, over 50 partners, including
major carriers and platforms such as SGTraDex, digitised end-to-end trade documents, reducing fraud and double-financing. • Regulated digital payment initiatives, notably XSGD, the world’s leading Singapore Dollar- pegged stablecoin issued by StraitsX, is one of the first digital assets to be acknowledged as sub- stantively compliant with the MAS single currency stablecoin regulatory framework. XSGD serves as a critical settlement bridge for real-world commerce. It is currently utilised in the Project BLOOM initia- tive to power instant, cross-border QR payments between Singapore and regional neighbours, as well as to provide 24/7 programmable settlement for institutional treasury and merchant “scan-to- pay” services via the Grab and OKX ecosystems. • Large private enterprises – eg, Senoko Energy, Singapore’s largest energy company, which part- nered with Electrify, a Singaporean retail electric- ity marketplace start-up to launch a peer-to-peer energy trading platform, SolarShare. • Financial services businesses leveraging block- chain in areas such as insurance, lending, asset securitisation and commodities trading. While blockchain underpins a wide range of activities across Singapore’s economy, asset tokenisation has emerged as the dominant use case, with tokenised bonds, money market funds and cash management services already launched commercially. Beyond MAS-led programmes, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) also invests in block- chain innovation by seeding challenges and hack- athons with funding and exposure, spurring innovation to support Singapore’s “Smart Nation” policy objec- tives. Additionally, Singapore has a thriving digital assets trading, custody and investment market, with exchanges, venture capital funds, crypto hedge funds, decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) projects all contributing to an active market. Notwithstanding this strong foundation, the block- chain landscape faces challenges. In 2025, Chia Der Jiun, managing director of MAS, outlined MAS’ pri- orities for the next ten years, focusing on two core themes: artificial intelligence (AI) and tokenisation. On AI, MAS seeks to anchor AI capabilities in Singapore’s
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