What happened
- Specific facts/numbers: MAS has run two tokenised MAS bill trials within the past month: a S$1 million issue dated 23 September 2026 maturing 30 September 2026, and a S$10 million issue dated 9 October 2026 maturing 23 October 2026; both are settled using wholesale CBDC on the Singapore dollar Test Network.
- Institutions involved: The Monetary Authority of Singapore is the issuer and operator of the SGD Testnet; the trials concern tokenised MAS bills available only to institutional investors.
- Regulatory/technical context: MAS says the trials are intended to bring tokenised assets and tokenised central bank digital currency together on common infrastructure with settlement certainty and finality; the bill page notes only institutional investors may apply and that tokenised MAS bill statistics are excluded from MAS’s regular MAS bill statistics.
- What to watch next: Watch for whether MAS expands issuance size, tenor, or frequency beyond trial-scale auctions and whether it links the tokenised-bill work to broader wholesale digital money initiatives; no firm next milestone was identified.
Why it matters
This is a concrete central-bank test of delivery-versus-payment style settlement for tokenised fixed-income instruments, showing how wholesale CBDC could support safer institutional digital-asset markets.
HKMA Relevance
Direct: Another monetary authority has taken a concrete action in HKMA’s remit by issuing tokenised bills and settling them with wholesale CBDC, a live policy and market-development step in central-bank money and payments infrastructure.