From Pilot to Standard: Singapore’s Project Guardian Tokenisation Rulebook for 2026

Singapore’s approach to tokenised finance has been unusually methodical: run pilots, document learnings, then convert them into market infrastructure and operating guidance. MAS launched Project Guardian in 2022 to explore tokenised finance, and public remarks at the Singapore FinTech Festival 2025 framed tokenisation as a structural theme for the next decade alongside AI. Over the past three years, the programme has shifted from proof-of-concept toward institutional use cases, including tokenised money market funds and bonds issued natively and settled on-chain. That progression is central to the Singapore Project Guardian asset tokenisation 2026 story: it is less about one-off experimentation and more about building a repeatable rulebook that regulated institutions can adopt.

Project Guardian’s scale and its focus areas signal why it is increasingly treated as a reference point. One summary of the programme describes it as expanded to more than 40 industry participants, with workstreams spanning legal structures, interoperability, and operating models for issuing, distributing, and managing tokenised assets across fixed income, funds, and structured products. The pilots themselves have aimed at real market frictions. A first live pilot in May 2022 involved DBS Bank, JP Morgan, and Marketnode, using tokenised bonds and deposits on a public blockchain. Under the programme, DBS also executed live tokenised FX and government securities trades via permissioned DeFi pools, including an on-chain trade of tokenised Singapore Government Securities and Japanese Government Bonds.

How Singapore Is Turning Trials into Standards

Singapore’s “pilot-to-standard” path becomes clearer when Project Guardian is viewed alongside adjacent initiatives designed to standardise settlement and interoperability. Global Layer 1 (GL1), launched in June 2024, is described as a shared-ledger initiative exploring infrastructure standards such as common settlement rules, data formats, and cross-network connectivity so tokenised assets can interoperate across platforms and jurisdictions. BLOOM, launched in October 2025, extends settlement capabilities by enabling real-time, cross-border settlement for tokenised assets and developing the settlement-asset layer needed for safer exchange with finality. Separately, an overnight interbank lending trial using Singapore dollar wholesale CBDC was completed in November 2025 with DBS, OCBC, and UOB, reinforcing the direction toward tokenised wholesale market plumbing.

Operational guidance is also starting to look like a rulebook. In November 2025, a Project Guardian industry group released a report on operationalising tokenised funds, covering practical angles and pointing to broader interoperability work such as integrating FIX standards into smart contracts, alongside cross-chain protocols and oracle networks. The same coverage contrasted the scale gap: global money market funds hold close to US$10 trillion in assets, while tokenised funds’ AUM sits at a few billion dollars, according to the CFA Institute. It also noted a 2024 BIS survey finding that wholesale CBDCs are currently the most widely used settlement asset in tokenisation pilots, ahead of both tokenised and non-tokenised deposits—an important cue for how institutions may prioritise settlement design.

Regional context helps explain why Singapore’s model travels. Across APAC, one report found that 24.3% of adults use digital assets versus a global average of 16.9%, and a separate study cited an average portfolio allocation across a range of digital assets at 7%, with target allocations expected to rise to 16% within three years. In this environment, frameworks “between policymakers and the financial industry” are being introduced to improve liquidity and efficiency via asset tokenisation, with Singapore’s Project Guardian explicitly named. The result is a pragmatic template: define regulated use cases, test settlement and custody assumptions, then standardise the interoperability and governance layers so tokenised assets can move from pilots into production workflows.