sg-crest A Singapore Government Agency Website

Central Bank Digital Currency

Technological advances and the rapid digitalisation of the economy are unlocking new possibilities for the future of money and payments, one of which is Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).
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Overview

As a central bank, MAS is tasked with ensuring sound money and efficient payments. We recognise that recent innovations have the potential to address some of the longstanding and emerging challenges in payments, including slow, opaque and expensive cross-border payments. Since 2016, MAS has been exploring the design and use of CBDCs, in collaboration with the industry, international organisations and other central banks. 

Our explorations into new forms of money and new ways payments could work complements, our ongoing developmental and regulatory efforts to enhance electronic payments in Singapore. 

 

What are CBDCs?

CBDCs are a digital form of central bank money. There are two main variants of CBDCs:

  • Wholesale CBDCs, which are solely for use by a select group of financial institutions to settle large-value transactions among themselves and the central bank, just like reserves today.
  • Retail CBDCs, which are for use by the general public for payments. These are the digital counterpart to the notes and coins that central banks issue today.

MAS work on CBDC

The MAS is trialing the live issuance of wholesale CBDC through the Singapore dollar Test Network (SGD Testnet). The SGD Testnet is an operational shared financial institutions to test the settlement of tokenised financial assets with common settlement assets, including wholesale CBDC. Building on this settlement pilot featuring the first live issuance with S$ wholesale CBDC, MAS plans in future trials to issue tokenised MAS Bills for settlement in CBDC

Key Speeches and Releases

  1. "MAS Announces Successful Live Trial of Settlement of Interbank Overnight Lending Using Wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency" - MAS completes a live trial on SGD Testnet on 13 Nov 2025.

  2. "MAS Announces Plans to Support Commercialisation of Asset Tokenisation" - MAS launched the Singapore Dollar Test Network (SGD Testnet), enabling financial institutions to settle transactions with S$ wholesale CBDC on 4 Nov 2024

  3. "MAS Lays Foundation for Safe and Innovative Use of Digital Money in Singapore" - MAS published a blueprint for the technology infrastructure to support digital money and announced MAS' plans to pilot the use of "live" wholesale CBDC on 16 Nov 2023.

  4. "MAS Propose Standards for Digital Money" - MAS published a whitepaper proposing a common protocol to specify conditions for the use of digital money such as Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), tokenised bank deposits, and stablecoins on a distributed ledger on 22 June 2023.

  5. "FinTech in its Element: Water, Metal, Fire, Wood, Earth" - Speech by Mr. Ravi Menon, Managing Director, Monetary Authority of SIngapore, at the SIngapore FinTech Festival 2022 on 3 November 2022.

Development Initiatives

SGD Testnet

The SGD Testnet is an operational shared ledger infrastructure that enables financial institutions to test the settlement of tokenised financial assets using wholesale CBDC

BLOOM

Collaborative initiative with the financial industry to strengthen Singapore's financial infrastructure capabilities by enabling the use of tokenised bank liabilities, well-regulated stablecoins and CBDCs as settlement assets.

Ubin+

Collaboration with international partners  on cross-border foreign exchange (FX) settlement using digital currencies.

Policy Research

Digital Currencies

Research by MAS and external economists on new forms of digital money.

What's New

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