The Monetary Authority of Singapore has never treated tokenised bank deposits as a standalone novelty. Its regulatory strategy places them inside an interlocking architecture: Project Guardian for industry experimentation, the BLOOM initiative for commercial-scale settlement trials, stablecoin legislation for the broader digital-money perimeter, and tokenised MAS bill trials for risk-free collateral on-chain. Understanding that architecture is essential to understanding why Singapore’s deposit-token market is advancing faster than jurisdictions that have approached tokenisation one pilot at a time.
BLOOM and the Settlement Asset Question
In November 2025, MAS announced BLOOM—Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency—an industry experimentation framework inviting financial institutions and clearing operators to trial tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins as settlement assets alongside CBDC rails. The initiative’s purpose is not to pick a winner among digital money forms. It is to test whether any combination of CBDC, tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins can meet the reliability and liquidity standards that institutional markets require at commercial scale.
MAS has been explicit that multiple settlement assets are likely to coexist. Tokenised bank deposits, regulated stablecoins and wholesale CBDC each serve different needs, and the central bank has resisted framing them as competitors. That stance matters for banks issuing deposit tokens: it signals that tokenised deposits are not a transitional compromise on the way to CBDC, but a durable part of the settlement landscape.
Regulation That Follows the Risk, Not the Technology
Singapore’s approach has been to keep tokenised assets inside existing regulatory perimeters rather than create a parallel regime that rewards regulatory arbitrage. Tokenised assets under Project Guardian remain subject to Singapore’s securities laws; the initiative tests new infrastructure, not a route around compliance. For deposit tokens specifically, the legal character of the instrument remains a bank liability, which gives it a risk profile and compliance framework distinct from privately issued cryptoassets.
The legislative calendar adds urgency. MAS has signalled draft stablecoin legislation and tokenised MAS bill trials for 2026, with a legal regime expected to take effect around mid-2026. Tokenised MAS bills would place Singapore’s risk-free short-term debt on-chain as programmable collateral, deepening the toolkit available to institutions settling tokenised deposit transactions. The combination—deposit tokens for commercial bank money, tokenised bills for collateral, and a regulated stablecoin perimeter—creates the components of a functioning tokenised money market rather than a collection of disconnected proofs of concept.
The Scale Problem MAS Has Not Yet Solved
Regulation and experimentation have moved faster than commercial adoption. MAS Managing Director Chia Der Jiun acknowledged in October 2026 that commercial tokenisation has been largely confined to smaller ecosystems, such as large banks offering deposit tokens in multiple currencies to corporate customers for treasury management. The harder challenge is extending deposit-token use beyond a single bank’s own ecosystem. “A single trading platform may be able to tokenise some equities for its own customers, but still be unable to tap into wider market liquidity,” Chia said, adding that scale requires customers, counterparties and financial market infrastructure to move together.
That is the gap BLOOM, Swift’s shared ledger and MAS’s interoperability push are designed to close. Singapore’s regulatory blueprint is unusually complete for a market at this stage. Its next test is whether the commercial layer—corporate treasuries, counterparties and payment flows—moves at the same speed as the rulebook.
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