Chia Der Jiun, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, said a stablecoin has to earn confidence in the value it promises mainly from reserves that outsiders can check and that are adequate. Money in a bank account can be exchanged at face value for central bank reserves, and that swap is what holds a deposit at par. For a stablecoin, that is not a given. “There may be limits to their suitability for settling large wholesale transactions,” he said in a keynote at INSEAD’s Digital Finance and Agentic AI Summit.
Where deposit tokens and stablecoins may sit
Chia described three forms of digital money, and each can do a different job. A tokenised bank deposit is a balance in a bank account, recorded as a token. A stablecoin is a token built to hold steady against a government currency. Central bank digital currency (CBDC) is money from the central bank in digital form.
Deposit tokens, he said, belong in banking work such as cash management and payments. Stablecoins may see wider use on crypto exchanges and in fintech payments. Trust in any of them rests on safety, a steady value, and broad acceptance. Assets that settle digital markets, especially wholesale payments between firms, need to be sound, regulated for their risks, and able to work together.
BLOOM is the industry platform the authority uses to push settlement with digital money, covering deposit tokens and regulated stablecoins in Singapore and across borders. He said digital money should make settlement more efficient and still meet the safeguards expected of regulated finance.
Reserves, and a wholesale limit
Private digital money can support new ways of paying, and it still has to sit inside a monetary system people trust, Chia said. He treated central bank money as what makes a payment final, and as what keeps one kind of money equal to another. That shared value is called the singleness of money. If some stablecoins became important enough to the financial system, the need to fix their value more firmly would grow. Talks and proposals already cover tougher rules and central-bank reserve balances for a stablecoin that later reached that size.
According to Blockhead, Chia left the authority’s own stance on that reserve access unsaid.
Wholesale CBDC will settle MAS bills
“As usage of private digital money scales, CBDCs will ultimately be needed to anchor monetary stability,” Chia said in the keynote. A wholesale Singapore-dollar CBDC is already on the SGD Testnet, a test network for that currency, which was operational in 2025. The first trial that worked moved overnight loans among DBS, OCBC and UOB. As its next step, MAS will use that wholesale CBDC to settle tokenised MAS Bills, Chia said, so tokenised assets and tokenised central-bank money can share one system and settle with finality.
Project Guardian, GL1 and SAFR
The speech also sketches work beside settlement. Project Guardian, the authority’s industry platform, has tested tokenised assets across markets, though commercial use is still mostly inside smaller groups, such as a bank’s own multi-currency deposit tokens for corporate treasury. Global Layer One, or GL1, seeks shared standards so separate networks can connect for cross-border tokenised deals, and version 1.1 of SAFR, the Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime paper, covers checks on AI agents that can start transactions, with an open-source reference build from the Future of Finance Institute.
Proposals still open until 16 October
The stablecoin framework is not law yet. P015-2026 opened on 1 September 2026. It would amend the Payment Services Act 2019 to add Singapore’s stablecoin framework and further requirements that reflect developments since 2023.
The 1 September release says the amendments would show how an issuer may qualify as regulated by the authority, and which safeguards it must meet for a stable value and for users. The framework, called MAS-SCS, would cover single-currency coins issued in Singapore and pegged to the Singapore dollar or a G10 currency. Only a licensed issuer would be allowed to call itself a licensed issuer of MAS-regulated stablecoins, or put that label on its coins. The label sets them apart from other crypto that uses the stablecoin name without the authority’s value rules. A stablecoin outside the framework would count as a digital payment token, or DPT, under the same user-protection rules as other DPTs. The release’s examples, which it does not call complete, are a risk check before someone uses DPT services, no rewards for trading those tokens, no financing or margin or leverage, and no locally issued credit card.
An earlier comment round, which the release describes, opened on 26 October 2022. The authority answered that round on 15 August 2023. This year’s paper would write the framework into the Payment Services Act, and it asks about reserve backing, capital, redemption at par and disclosure. Redemption at par means handing the coin back for the currency it tracks. Chia listed the same safeguards in his speech.
The release says MAS proposes to let a coin issued jointly by a Singapore firm and a foreign firm use the MAS-SCS label if the risks are reduced enough. With cross-border wholesale use in mind, it also proposes to recognise a limited number of stablecoins issued abroad under a comparable foreign framework. Chia said the framework should handle that cross-border activity, so regulated stablecoins can support wholesale payments and settlement between countries.
MAS also proposes a ban on paying interest on MAS-regulated stablecoins, a stress-test requirement, and plans for recovery and an orderly wind-down of the issuer. It proposes user-protection duties like those already on Payment Services Act licensees, including safeguarding customer money that arrives before the coins are issued, the release said.
Comments close on 16 October 2026, and the consultation is still open.
This article is not investment advice.
