Tokenised MAS Bills will settle in wholesale Singapore dollar central bank digital currency (CBDC), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said, with Managing Director Chia Der Jiun announcing the plan in a keynote at the INSEAD Digital Finance and Agentic AI Summit on 9 October 2026.
The aim, Chia said, is to learn how tokenised securities and tokenised central bank money can run on shared rails, with trades that settle with certainty and are final. The wholesale CBDC itself is not new: MAS has offered it on its Singapore dollar Test Network (SGD Testnet), live since 2025. DBS, OCBC and UOB ran the first successful trial, settling overnight loans between the three banks.
"Three developments stand out. Assets are becoming digital. Money is becoming programmable. Financial infrastructure is becoming more interconnected," Chia said.
For Chia, whether the technology works is no longer in doubt. The harder part is running it safely, on commercial terms, and at scale. He set out three building blocks: clear law and regulation, shared industry standards, and infrastructure that market participants can rely on, applied to tokenised assets, digital money, and the networks that carry both.
Digital assets: from pilots to scale
Chia said Project Guardian, MAS's joint platform with industry, has already proved what tokenisation can do in a range of asset classes. The task now, he said, is to get firms to use it commercially and at scale. On regulation, MAS's Guide on the Tokenisation of Capital Markets Products sets out how current securities law covers tokenised products. It starts with technology neutrality: the rules follow the risk an activity carries, not the technology behind it. MAS is also looking at where tokenisation may still need clearer legal footing.
So far, real uptake has come in closed circles. Think of a big bank giving its corporate customers tokenised deposits in more than one currency to run their treasury. He pointed to repo as an area where gains are already real, while noting that tokenised activity is still small compared with conventional markets. Where there is a clear case for a market to switch over together, he said, MAS is prepared to step in and coordinate.
Digital money: several forms, anchored by central banks
Chia does not expect any one form of digital money to win out. He sees room for tokenised bank deposits, regulated stablecoins and central bank digital currency, each doing a different job. Banks would use deposit tokens for things they already do, such as corporate payments and cash management, while stablecoins would mostly circulate on crypto exchanges and in fintech apps. BLOOM, MAS's programme for settling with digital money, accepts both tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins, domestically and across borders. Visa joined BLOOM in August to pilot stablecoin settlement.
In his view, central bank money makes settlement final and keeps all forms of money exchangeable one-for-one, and stablecoins may not suit very large wholesale settlements. MAS has consulted on legal changes to implement its Single-Currency Stablecoin framework. The proposals cover how issuers back their coins, hold capital against them, redeem at par, and make disclosures, and how coins issued across several jurisdictions, or regulated under comparable foreign regimes, would be treated.
"As usage of private digital money scales, CBDCs will ultimately be needed to anchor monetary stability," Chia said.
Infrastructure: a network of networks
Rather than one global ledger, Chia expects a web of linked ledgers and platforms. If networks cannot talk to each other, he warned, liquidity gets split into separate pools and firms end up building the same plumbing twice. MAS is working with industry on common standards through Global Layer One (GL1). Its work includes a Market Infrastructure Toolkit to check digital market infrastructure against international standards, and a Programmable Compliance Toolkit to write rules directly into that infrastructure.
The speech also covered AI agents in finance, including version 1.1 of MAS's Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR) white paper.
Why it matters
Settling tokenised MAS Bills in wholesale CBDC puts a tokenised government security and tokenised central bank money on the same infrastructure; the combination, Chia argued, means tokenised markets need to scale safely. For banks, issuers and custodians in Singapore, the speech signals that MAS will favour use cases where whole markets can move together, and that the rules for stablecoins and tokenised products are being firmed up in parallel.
Chia ended on three takeaways: tokenisation pays off when it solves a real business problem, more than one kind of digital money will be needed with central banks as the anchor, and the future lies in connected networks.
