The Monetary Authority of Singapore‘s (MAS) implementation of five supplementary industry pilots for Project Guardian aims to evaluate various asset tokenization use cases.
Under the leadership of Singapore’s central bank, Project Guardian is a collaborative effort to create a new financial infrastructure utilizing decentralized finance (DeFi) components. The most recent initiatives focus on developing foundational capabilities to scale tokenized markets. As described by MAS:
“These developments under Project Guardian will catalyze the institutional adoption of digital assets, with the aim of freeing up liquidity, unlocking investment opportunities, and increasing the efficiency of financial markets.”
Citi, T. Rowe Price, and Fidelity International, three of the seventeen financial institutions members of Project Guardian, are conducting trials of bilateral digital asset trade mechanisms.
Additionally, they are investigating digital asset trade analytics and real-time post-trade reporting. Ant Group is evaluating the capacity of a treasury management solution to improve global liquidity management funding.
Furthermore, BNY Mellon and OCBC have assumed the testing of a cross-border foreign exchange payment solution for payments across heterogeneous networks.
Franklin Templeton is conducting trials on the variable capital company (VCC) structure for issuing a tokenized money market fund. In the meantime, JPMorgan and Apollo have joined forces to automate laborious manual asset servicing processes utilizing digital assets.
MAS launched Global Layer One to investigate the design of an open digital infrastructure that will host tokenized financial assets and applications in addition to the five prototypes.
In addition, the central bank and the financial industry have worked together to develop the Interlinked Network Model, which will provide financial institutions with a standardized framework for exchanging digital assets across independent networks.
Additionally, the MAS disclosed that the International Monetary Fund is a policymaker that Project Guardian monitors.
