Singapore's Tokenised Assets Push: From REITs to Real Estate on-Chain
Khushi V Rangdhol Sep 05, 2025 00:37
In 2025, Singapore's focus is on methodical asset tokenization, starting with bonds and funds, while developing stablecoin regulations and infrastructure for institutional finance.
Singapore isn’t promising a crypto free-for-all. It’s doing something more methodical: wiring regulated finance for tokenisation—first with bonds, funds and deposits, and, in time, structures that can hold real estate.
What Singapore is actually building in 2025
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) runs Project Guardian, a multi-year program with global banks and market operators to test how regulated assets work as tokens—across issuance, trading, collateral, and settlement. The public Project Guardian page lists pilots spanning tokenised bonds, funds, foreign-exchange, and deposits, with industry participants moving from proofs-of-concept toward limited live activity.
To move beyond experiments, MAS has announced commercialisation plans for asset tokenisation—industry workstreams to deepen liquidity, improve interoperability, and push real use across institutions.
Two other pillars matter for a tokenised economy:
- Stablecoin rules. MAS finalised a Stablecoin Regulatory Framework that sets reserve quality, redemption timelines and disclosure standards for single-currency stablecoins (initially SGD or G10 currencies) issued in Singapore. It’s designed to make fiat-linked tokens usable inside regulated finance.
- Perimeter clarity for service providers. In 2025 MAS clarified the Digital Token Service Providers (DTSP) regime under the Financial Services and Markets Act, extending certain obligations to overseas activity that targets Singapore users—important for cross-border tokenised markets.
From pilots to production: who’s doing what
Market infrastructure. Marketnode—a Temasek/SGX-backed digital markets operator now joined by Euroclear and HSBC as shareholders—has been building issuance and lifecycle tools for tokenised funds, bonds and credit, part of a plan to create Asia’s “digital backbone.” Euroclear’s 2024 investment signalled mainstream post-trade interest; 2025 coverage describes Marketnode’s roadmap from funds into tokenised credit.
Banks and asset managers.
- UBS Asset Management ran a tokenised Variable Capital Company (VCC) fund pilot in Singapore, under the Project Guardian umbrella.
- DBS has been a consistent participant (tokenised deposits/treasury tokens under Guardian/Orchid). In August 2025 it announced tokenised structured notes on a public chain, building on earlier MAS-led pilots.
- And as of September 2025, DBS and Franklin Templeton announced a tie-up to trade and lend against a tokenised USD money-market fund on DBS’s exchange, alongside a USD stablecoin—aimed at accredited and institutional clients. (This is Singapore-based DBS but a global partnership.)
Capital-markets incentives. MAS launched the Global-Asia Digital Bond Grant Scheme in January 2025 to subsidise cost and attract issuers to list digital bonds out of Singapore—another nudge from pilot to pipeline.
Where REITs and real estate fit
Singapore is one of the world’s deepest REIT markets. While MAS has not announced a public program to tokenize listed S-REIT units themselves, the regulatory and market infrastructure being built—tokenised fund wrappers (e.g., VCC funds), bonds, deposits, and stablecoin rails—creates a compliant path to tokenised real-estate exposure via funds or notes that hold property or REIT portfolios. That’s the realistic near-term vector for “real estate on-chain” in Singapore: tokenised funds and securitised claims rather than land titles. (No Singapore authority has said property titles will live on a public chain.)
Private-market platforms in Singapore have already issued tokenised fund interests and private real-estate strategies to accredited/qualified investors, and industry roundups show growing issuer and holder bases—though liquidity is still shallow and fragmented.
Why tokenisation, not “just crypto,” is the headline
The pitch isn’t speculative trading; it’s plumbing:
- Fractional ownership and faster settlement. Tokens can represent fund shares, notes, deposits and settle delivery-versus-payment with fewer intermediaries. Guardian pilots in 2025 targeted interoperability (e.g., hashed time-locked contracts between bank ledgers) and payment-versus-payment orchestration to cut settlement risk—classic institutional pain points.
- Regulated money on chain. Stablecoins that meet MAS’ framework, or tokenised bank deposits, give tokenised assets a cash leg that’s supervised—critical for repo, collateral and on-chain fund administration.
- Institutional market-structure. With SGX/Temasek/Euroclear/HSBC behind Marketnode, Singapore is trying to ensure a CSD-grade post-trade experience for digital assets—corporate actions, registries, and audit trails that institutions require.
The fine print: what to expect—and what not to
Expect more tokenised funds and bonds offered to accredited and institutional investors first, plus experiments that marry stablecoins or tokenised deposits to these products for collateral and settlement. Watch for cross-border links: Singapore has been striking capital-markets and payments MoUs across Asia, and exchanges and banks are testing corridors for digital assets.
Don’t expect instant retail access to tokenised real estate, or property title registries on a public blockchain. Singapore’s approach is explicitly regulation-first; even the new DTSP rules in 2025 underscore market-conduct standards and extraterritorial oversight rather than liberalisation.
The bottom line for readers
Singapore’s tokenisation push is real, but it is institutional before it is popular. The policy stack—Project Guardian, stablecoin standards, DTSP perimeter, and exchange-led infrastructure—gives banks and asset managers a credible way to issue and trade tokenised funds, bonds and deposits now, and to wrap real-estate exposure inside compliant fund vehicles over time. For investors, that means the first wave of “real estate on-chain” in Singapore will likely look like tokenised units of funds or structured notes, not tokenised deeds.
In other words: less hype, more rails—and a clear route from REIT culture to on-chain real-estate finance as the pipes mature.
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