Project Guardian: MAS's Tokenization Program Explained

At a glance

Item	Detail
Led by	Monetary Authority of Singapore
Started	2022
Policymakers	9, including the UK FCA, Japan FSA, FINMA, Banque de France, Bundesbank, ASIC, IMF, World Bank
Financial institutions	28
Associations	7: CMTA, GFMA, ICMA, ISDA, SWIFT, The Investment Association, IMAS
Workstreams	Asset & wealth management (Schroders), fixed income (ICMA), FX (Ant Group, ISDA)

Source: MAS Project Guardian page, last updated 29 January 2026.

What Project Guardian is

Project Guardian is an industry collaboration, not a product or a blockchain. MAS sets the questions, financial institutions run live trials on the ledgers they choose, and the group turns what works into shared standards for token issuance, trading, settlement, custody and compliance.

Its stated aims are three: common protocols across asset classes so tokens issued by one firm can be traded and settled by another; risk and regulatory frameworks covering custody, settlement finality, compliance, security and resilience; and cross-border settlement that stays within each jurisdiction's rules. The 28 financial institutions include Citi, DBS, Deutsche Bank, Euroclear, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Hamilton Lane, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, OCBC, Schroders, SGX Group, Standard Chartered, T. Rowe Price, UBS and UOB.

The 2022 pilot: banks on a public DeFi protocol

The first Guardian pilot, in November 2022, ran on Polygon's public network. DBS, J.P. Morgan and SBI Digital Asset Holdings used a permissioned version of the Aave lending protocol, Aave Arc, with access limited to verified institutions through W3C verifiable credentials.

J.P. Morgan tokenised Singapore dollar deposits and SBI tokenised yen deposits for a live cross-currency trade; DBS and SBI also tokenised government bonds, with reports differing on whether the bond trades were live or simulated. The point was proof of concept: regulated institutions could use public DeFi infrastructure if access was controlled by credentials. Aave later cited the pilot as an input to its institutional product. Participants named legal clarity as the biggest obstacle, which shaped what Guardian worked on next.

The frameworks Guardian has published

Guardian's output is mostly standards. MAS lists frameworks for tokenised funds, fixed income and bank liabilities, technical papers on linking networks, and a paper on open, interoperable networks developed with the BIS Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures.

• Guardian Funds Framework (GFF) and Operationalising Tokenised Funds: how to run a fund's lifecycle (subscription, valuation, redemption, distribution) with tokens.
• Guardian Fixed Income Framework (GFIF), with an addendum: market practices for tokenised bonds.
• Use of Tokenised Bank Liabilities for Transaction Banking: design and risk considerations for tokenised deposits in corporate payments.
• Interlinking Networks and Enabling Open & Interoperable Networks: how separate ledgers and token networks connect.
• Bridging the Adoption Gap: an asset-management industry paper from IMAS and the UK Investment Association, supported by MAS and the FCA.

Named live use cases include products from Ant Group, Apollo, DBS, Franklin Templeton, Hamilton Lane, OCBC and UBS.

2025 and 2026: from trials to settlement

At the Singapore FinTech Festival in November 2025, MAS said DBS, OCBC and UOB had completed interbank overnight lending with the first live trial issuance of Singapore dollar wholesale CBDC, and that it would trial issuing tokenised MAS Bills to primary dealers, settled in wholesale CBDC.

MAS's Managing Director also announced BLOOM, an initiative for trials using tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins, and stablecoin legislation, which reached consultation in September 2026 (see Singapore's stablecoin framework). Industry trackers have reported the first tokenised MAS Bill issuances in autumn 2026; we could not confirm the dates in an official MAS release, so watch for announcements at SFF 2026 on 18-20 November.

The direction is clear even where dates are not: tokenised assets (funds, bonds, MAS Bills) and tokenised money (wholesale CBDC, deposits, regulated stablecoins) on shared or connected ledgers, with Guardian supplying the market standards.

Where public chains like Stellar fit

Guardian is ledger-neutral. Its frameworks are written to apply across "diverse ledger technologies", and its first pilot used a public network with permissioned access. Whether a given trial uses a public chain is the participant's choice.

Stellar already hosts products from Guardian members. Franklin Templeton's on-chain US government money fund, the first US-registered fund to use a public blockchain for transactions and share ownership, has run on Stellar since 2021; see Franklin Templeton's BENJI on Stellar. Stellar's design maps well onto what Guardian asks for: issuer-level controls such as authorisation and clawback, identity-gated access for regulated assets, and fast, cheap settlement. That is the case for public chains in institutional tokenisation: the openness of DeFi, with access and compliance enforced where the regulator expects it. More in RWA tokenization on Stellar and tokenized money market funds.

What Guardian has not solved yet

Four years in, the hard problems are less about technology and more about law, money and connections between networks. Guardian's own papers say so.

• Settlement asset. A tokenised bond is only as useful as the money it settles against. Guardian is moving toward wholesale central bank money, tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins, but none is yet available at scale across borders.
• Interoperability. Banks have built on different ledgers. The interlinking papers describe how networks should connect; making that routine is still ahead.
• Legal certainty. Participants flagged it after the first pilot, and it remains jurisdiction by jurisdiction: what a token legally represents, and when a transfer is final.
• Secondary liquidity. Issuing tokenised funds and bonds has proven easier than building active markets in them.

These are the same gaps that limit tokenised assets on public chains, which is why the two worlds are converging rather than competing. See RWA demand in 2026.

Why it matters beyond Singapore

Guardian's policymaker group includes regulators from the UK, Japan, Switzerland, France, Germany and Australia, plus the IMF and World Bank. Standards agreed there tend to travel. For anyone building tokenised products, Guardian's frameworks are a useful checklist of what large institutions will expect before they touch a token: legal certainty about what the token represents, settlement finality, identity checks on every holder, and a clear way to connect to other networks.