Singapore's Central Bank Completes Digital Currency Trial

Singapore’s central bank has completed a distributed ledger trial focused on inter-bank payments, officials said today.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced the test in November, working with the R3 banking consortium and a group of member banks that is said to include the Development Bank of Singapore, HSBC, Bank of America and JPMorgan, among others. According to the bank, the aim was to develop "a digital representation of the Singapore dollar for interbank settlement".

MAS officials said that a more comprehensive report on the test would be forthcoming, though it didn’t provide an exact release date.

According to the central bank, further tests are planned that will utilize the tech and lessons gleaned from the first test.

The MAS said:

"MAS has plans for two spin-off projects that will leverage the lessons of the inter-bank payments project. The first project, driven by the Singapore Exchange (SGX), focuses on making the fixed income securities trading and settlement cycle more efficient through DLT. The second project focuses on new methods to conduct cross border payments using central bank digital currency."

As part of that second planned test, the MAS said that discussions are already under way to connect Singapore’s payment system with "other countries", utilizing the tech to manage those transactions.

Notably, Sopnendu Mohanty, chief fintech officer for the MAS, said that the work between the institution and several of the banks has already spawned other iterations of the inter-bank trial.

"Already, some institutions have embarked on projects that are inspired by this collaboration. We look forward to the next phases of our project which will develop trial applications for securities settlement and cross border payments," he said.

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