Asia and the Gulf

Seen from Europe, tokenisation often looks like a transatlantic affair, contested between Washington and Brussels. Yet a decisive share of the innovation is happening in the East. Singapore launched the world’s most ambitious institutional tokenisation programme as early as 2022. Hong Kong issued tokenised government bonds before any European country. Japan has created a tokenised real estate market that works. Dubai has tokenised property title deeds directly in the land registry. Korea is about to move part of its securities market onto blockchain. A European entrepreneur needs to know these centres, because they are at once competitors, potential partners and laboratories whose results shed light on his own choices.

Singapore, the institutional laboratory

The Monetary Authority of Singapore, the MAS, made tokenisation a strategic priority with a distinctive method, that of supervised experimentation with large institutions. Project Guardian, launched in May 2022, now brings together more than forty financial institutions from around the world, banks, asset managers and infrastructures, which test the tokenisation of bonds, funds, currencies and structured products, and draw up common standards.

In parallel the MAS built the monetary infrastructure. In November 2025 the three large Singapore banks, DBS, OCBC and UOB, settled overnight interbank loans in wholesale central bank digital currency, the first live issuance of its kind in Singapore. The MAS announced that it would henceforth settle the issuance of tokenised MAS bills to primary dealers in central bank digital currency. Its initiative called BLOOM is studying settlement using tokenised bank deposits and regulated stablecoins.