The central bank of Singapore, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), stated on Wednesday that “the first industry pilot under the MAS’ Project Guardian that explores potential decentralized finance (defi) applications in wholesale funding markets has completed its first live trades.”
According to the notice for this pilot, “DBS Bank, JP Morgan, and SBI Digital Asset Holdings conducted foreign exchange and government bond transactions against liquidity pools comprising of tokenized Singapore Government Securities Bonds, Japanese Government Bonds, Japanese Yen (JPY), and Singapore Dollar (SGD).”
A tokenized JPY and SGD deposit cross-currency transaction was successfully completed. Additionally, a practice exercise that involved buying and selling tokenized government bonds was carried out.
A great achievement by JP Morgan
According to Sopnendu Mohanty, the Chief Fintech Officer of MAS, live pilots run by business players show that digital assets and DeFi have the potential to change capital markets with the right safeguards in place.
Mohanty described it as a significant step toward enabling “more effective and connected global financial networks” and added that Project Guardian has “deepened” the regulator’s understanding of the ecosystem for digital assets as well as helped Singapore establish its digital asset policy.
JPM’s Onyx blockchain branch for wholesale payments collaborated with Temasek, Singapore’s DBS Bank, Japan’s SBI Digital, Singapore Exchange’s Marketnode digital asset platform, and Singapore’s SBI for the initial testing phase. In addition to a simulated exchange of tokenized government bonds, the participants carried out a cross-border transaction using tokenized deposits of Singapore dollars and Japanese yen.
Umar Farooq, the CEO of JP Morgan subsidiary Onyx, said they are collaborating closely to provide financial services using blockchain technology. In addition, DeFi trade represents a “major milestone” for industrial applications, according to AAVE, a DeFi lending protocol.
