Singapore's Project Guardian in 2026: Tokenization at Institutional Scale
MAS's Project Guardian is one of the most-advanced institutional tokenization initiatives globally. Where it actually sits in 2026.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore launched Project Guardian in May 2022 as a small set of bond and FX tokenization pilots involving DBS and JPMorgan. By 2026 the initiative has grown into a 40-plus-institution framework spanning tokenized funds, bonds, FX, trade finance, and bank deposits, with several pilots in production deployment and a regulatory architecture that has become the reference point for institutional tokenization across Asia. This post walks through what is actually running, what is still pilot, and how Singapore’s approach compares to the Hong Kong, EU, and UAE equivalents.
The participant set#
The participants tell the story. The Singapore anchor banks — DBS, OCBC, and UOB — are all active. The international banks include JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Citi, BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, SBI Digital Asset Holdings, and UBS. The asset managers include Schroders, Franklin Templeton, Apollo, Ondo, and Fidelity International. Infrastructure providers include Onyx by JPMorgan, Marketnode (an SGX-backed venue), ADDX, and Partior (the DBS/JPM/Temasek-backed cross-border settlement network). The regulatory cohort is not symbolic — these are the institutions that will run institutional tokenization globally if it works, and they are running pilots through Singapore because the framework lets them.
What is operationally in production#
Several pilots have transitioned from sandbox to live deployment. Tokenized commercial paper has moved past pilot at multiple banks — JPMorgan’s Onyx Digital Assets platform settled live repo trades with DBS through 2024, and the volumes have grown through 2025-2026. Atomic cross-currency FX settlement has gone live on the Partior network, with SGD-USD, SGD-JPY, and SGD-EUR corridors operating production volumes — the value is not throughput but the elimination of Herstatt risk through delivery-versus-payment on a single ledger. Tokenized fund interests have shipped at Franklin Templeton’s OnChain US Government Money Fund (extended to Singapore through Project Guardian), Schroders’ tokenized fund pilots, and Apollo’s tokenized credit fund. Tokenized bonds have moved from one-off issuances to programmatic — UBS issued a tokenized structured note on Ethereum public chain in 2023, and HSBC’s Orion platform has issued multiple digital bonds.
The regulatory architecture#
What makes Singapore distinct is the permit-and-supervise posture rather than the prohibit-and-wait posture. The framework rests on four pieces. The Capital Markets Services license under the Securities and Futures Act covers most asset-management and dealer activities. The Payment Services Act covers digital token services. MAS’s specific tokenization guidance clarifies how existing securities law applies to tokenized representations. And the Project Guardian sandbox itself provides a structured forum for pilots that do not yet fit cleanly into either framework. The combination lets institutional participants operate without regulatory ambiguity — which is the single most important precondition for putting real balance sheet behind a tokenized product.
Comparison with Hong Kong Ensemble#
The natural comparison is Hong Kong’s Project Ensemble, launched by the HKMA in March 2024. Ensemble is more narrowly focused on wholesale CBDC and tokenized deposits, with green bonds and trade finance as primary use cases. Guardian is broader — it covers public-chain interactions, asset managers, and a wider product set. Ensemble has the advantage of tighter scope and faster decision cycles within a single jurisdiction. The two frameworks are increasingly interoperability targets for each other rather than competitors, and the Singapore-Hong Kong corridor has become a real test case for cross-jurisdiction tokenized settlement. The UAE’s ADGM and DIFC frameworks are also actively interoperating with Guardian, particularly on tokenized fund distribution.
Global Layer One — the longer bet#
MAS’s larger structural bet is Global Layer One (GL1), announced in 2023 — a foundational wholesale tokenization infrastructure intended to be jurisdiction-agnostic, governed by a multi-institution consortium, and capable of supporting interoperable tokenized assets across the major regulated venues. BNY Mellon, Citi, JPMorgan, MUFG, and Société Générale-Forge are among the named participants. GL1 is meaningfully different from a single-bank platform or a single-jurisdiction CBDC because it explicitly assumes multi-issuer, multi-jurisdiction, regulated-institutional participation. If GL1 reaches scale, it becomes the closest thing institutional finance has had to a shared neutral ledger for tokenized assets. As of 2026, GL1 remains in development with first production use-cases expected through 2026-2027.
What enterprise tokenization actually needs#
For corporates and asset managers thinking about a tokenization initiative, three operational realities matter. First, the legal wrapper is harder than the smart contract — a tokenized bond requires the same prospectus, custody, and corporate action machinery as a non-tokenized bond, plus a clean opinion that the token represents the underlying claim. Second, secondary liquidity is the hard part — primary issuance is straightforward, but a tokenized asset with no secondary venue is not actually more liquid than its non-tokenized equivalent. Third, integration with existing post-trade systems — SWIFT, DTCC, Euroclear, the local CSDs — is where the real engineering investment goes, not the on-chain issuance itself.
Where pdpspectra fits#
Our data engineering and cloud infrastructure practice supports fintech and digital-asset engineering work across Singapore and the broader Asia-Pacific, including the post-trade integration, MAS licensing data architecture, and the production-grade observability that institutional tokenization deployments need.
Related reading: the Japan stablecoin framework post, the Singapore MAS payments post, and the UAE fintech post.
Singapore tokenization is operationally leading, not theoretical. Talk to our team about your tokenization strategy.