Singapore's Central Bank Announces Initiatives to Ensure Safe and Innovative Use of Digital Currencies

According to Foresight News, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has announced three initiatives to ensure the safe and innovative use of digital currencies in Singapore. These include outlining the infrastructure blueprint for a digital Singapore dollar, expanding digital currency trials, and planning to issue a 'real-time' central bank digital currency (CBDC) for wholesale settlement. The three forms of digital currencies being promoted by MAS are wholesale CBDC, tokenized bank liabilities, and regulated stablecoins. MAS has released the Orchid blueprint, which lists the technical infrastructure required to facilitate digital currency exchanges in the future, including settlement ledgers, tokenization bridges, programmable protocols, and name services. To test the broad applicability of PBM and digital currencies in Singapore, MAS will expand the Orchid project's digital currency trials, partnering with industry players for four new experiments. These include OCBC Bank and UOB exploring the feasibility of one bank's token being accepted by another bank for retail payments; Ant International, Fazz, and Grab launching a pilot to facilitate Alipay users' payments to GrabPay merchants using the PBM concept; Amazon and HSBC exploring the tokenization of accounts payable from Amazon to merchants using PBM; and JPMorgan exploring the use of payment controls to enable the bank's institutional clients to hold deposit tokens and transfer them to customers outside the card-issuing bank's direct customer base. To complement the financial industry's digital currency trials involving retail and corporate users, MAS will begin developing a CBDC for wholesale interbank settlement next year.