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

(Corrects pararagraph 4 to say "BLOOM" initiative, not "Blue") SINGAPORE (Reuters) -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. (Reporting by Yantoultra Ngui and Jun Yuan Yong; Editing by David Stanway)

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