Participants in Project Guardian, led by MAS, launched five additional pilot projects to test asset tokenisation use cases.
They span areas such as listings, issuance, trading, settlement and asset servicing.
Expansion of asset-tokenisation initiatives
Citi, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., and Fidelity International are testing mechanisms for efficient price discovery and bilateral trading, as well as real-time post-trade reporting and analytics.
BNY Mellon and OCBC are testing a solution for cross-border currency payments to enable secure and interoperable payment rails across heterogeneous networks.
Ant Group is testing treasury-management technology to improve liquidity funding worldwide. It is expected to enable multi-currency clearing and real-time settlements through a global treasury hub in Singapore that supports more than 40 currencies.
Franklin Templeton is exploring the possibility of issuing a tokenised money-market fund through a Variable Capital Company (VCC) structure that uses digital-asset networks to account for fund units.
J.P. Morgan and Apollo are collaborating on the use of digital assets to enable seamless investing and management of trust-managed portfolios, as well as alternative assets, automated portfolio rebalancing, and scalable customization. This will save time and reduce manual processes.
As part of the project, a new line of work with funds has been launched. This workflow aims to address tax, policy and legal issues while expanding distribution channels for asset managers.
MAS will collaborate with ACRA to better assess the opportunities and risks of implementing digital shares of VCC funds.
Infrastructure initiatives to scale tokenised markets
MAS is collaborating with international regulators and institutions, including BNY Mellon, DBS, JP Morgan and MUFG, to study the design of open infrastructure where tokenised financial assets and applications will be hosted.
The new Global Layer One (GL1) initiative will facilitate seamless cross-border transactions and enable the trading of security tokens through global liquidity pools in compliance with regulatory requirements and guiding principles.
MAS is working with industry participants to develop an interconnected network model (INM) that will underpin the exchange of digital assets across independent blockchains. This will enable institutions to transact with one another without needing to be on the same chain.
In June, MAS released a report summarising preliminary findings from Project Guardian. At the time, participants tested the viability of DeFi applications, as well as options for tokenising real-world assets into digital tokens without risk to global financial stability and integrity.