Monetary Authority of Singapore turns BLOOM into the settlement leg of Project Guardian
The December 2025 speech makes explicit that MAS wants Singapore’s tokenised-finance market to scale with supervised settlement assets and interoperable networks, not with asset tokenisation alone.
Key takeaways
- • MAS’s 3 December 2025 speech clarifies an ambiguity that still existed after the October BLOOM launch.
- • By calling BLOOM the settlement equivalent of Project Guardian, MAS made clear that Singapore’s tokenisation agenda is being split into an asset-commercialisation lane and a settlement-assets lane.
- • That reading is reinforced by prior official releases on common settlement facilities, BLOOM’s network-coordination role, and live wholesale-CBDC settlement testing.
Trigger
Innovation, Supervision And Partnerships: Priorities In A Changing Landscape
At the FIA Asia Derivatives Conference on 3 December 2025, MAS indexed a keynote by Lim Tuang Lee, Assistant Managing Director (Capital Markets), under the title “Innovation, Supervision and Partnerships: Priorities in a Changing Landscape.” The indexed extract says BLOOM is the settlement equivalent of Project Guardian and supports industry trials with tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins. MAS explicitly assigned BLOOM the money-and-settlement function in Singapore’s institutional tokenisation stack.
Open source documentSN Desk view
Read against MAS’s 2024-2025 sequence, Singapore is constructing a layered architecture. Project Guardian remains the asset side: industry frameworks, commercial networks, and tokenised capital-markets use cases. GL1 and the SGD Testnet are the infrastructure side: shared-ledger environments, standards, and common settlement facilities.
BLOOM is the settlement-assets side: tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins, with emphasis on distribution, clearing, transfer, redemption, programmable compliance, and cross-border wholesale use cases. That matters because settlement had been the missing public hinge between Singapore’s tokenised-asset pilots and any production narrative. MAS’s November 2024 commercialisation plan had already said regulated forms of tokenised money were needed as common settlement assets and made SGD Testnet available to eligible institutions. The October 2025 BLOOM launch then extended the frame beyond wholesale CBDC alone by explicitly pulling tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins into the settlement conversation. The November 2025 live trial of interbank overnight lending using wholesale CBDC showed MAS was willing to test official-book settlement on that infrastructure, not just publish design papers. The key analytical point is that MAS is not signalling winner-takes-all money design. Singapore is testing several settlement instruments inside a supervised perimeter and treating interoperability as the precondition for scale. That is consistent with other November 2025 institutional signals: MAS described CBDCs, tokenised bank liabilities, and regulated stablecoins as the main candidate settlement assets, and joined cross-border synchronised FX work with the Bank of England and the Bank of Thailand. The 3 December trigger shows MAS wants tokenised-asset adoption to be paired with a governed settlement layer, where money-form choice, redemption logic, and cross-network operability are first-order design questions.