The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has unveiled five new industry pilots as part of Project Guardian, an initiative exploring asset tokenization. Led by MAS, the project aims to develop foundational capabilities for scaling tokenized markets. The pilots involve financial institutions like Citi, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity International, Ant Group, BNY Mellon, OCBC, Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan, and Apollo, testing various aspects such as digital asset trade mechanisms, cross-border payments, treasury management, and more. Project Guardian is focused on institutional adoption of digital assets to enhance liquidity, unlock investment opportunities, and improve financial market efficiency.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has introduced five additional industry pilots as part of Project Guardian, an initiative aimed at exploring the potential of asset tokenization and developing foundational capabilities for scaling tokenized markets. Led by MAS, Project Guardian involves collaborations with various financial institutions to test different use cases that could catalyze institutional adoption of digital assets.
The five industry pilots and their respective objectives are as follows:
Citi, T. Rowe Price, and Fidelity International: Testing bilateral digital asset trade mechanisms, exploring real-time post-trade reporting, and analytics of digital asset trades
Ant Group: Testing a Treasury Management Solution's capability to enhance liquidity management funding globally
BNY Mellon and OCBC: Testing a cross-border foreign exchange payment solution for payments across heterogeneous networks
Franklin Templeton: Testing the issuance of a tokenized money market fund through a variable capital company (VCC) structure
JPMorgan and Apollo are collaborating to address time-consuming manual processes for asset servicing using digital assets.
In addition to these pilots, MAS has launched Global Layer One, which explores the design of an open digital infrastructure to host tokenized financial assets and applications. The central bank has also worked with the financial industry to develop an interlinked network model, serving as a common framework for exchanging digital assets across independent networks among financial institutions.
As part of the collaborative initiative, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been included as one of Project Guardian's policymakers. The overarching goal is to facilitate institutional adoption of digital assets, unlock liquidity, expand investment opportunities, and enhance financial market efficiency.
(ARIJIT SARKAR, COINTELEGRAPH, 2023)