Singapore’s central bank has completed a live trial of using a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) to settle overnight interbank loans, moving its experiments with tokenised assets onto an operational test network.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said the trial, conducted on its Singapore Dollar Test Network (SGD Testnet), involved three of the city-state’s largest lenders – DBS, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp (OCBC) and United Overseas Bank (UOB).
Transactions were recorded in the banks’ official books and regulatory filings, marking the first live issuance of a Singapore dollar wholesale CBDC, MAS said in a statement.
The SGD Testnet is a shared ledger infrastructure that allows banks and other financial institutions to settle tokenised assets in central bank money.
MAS said it is designed to cut settlement risk and fragmentation by using a common digital Singapore dollar as the settlement asset across different platforms.
The system also supports programmable payments, enabling banks to embed conditions from their counterparty agreements so that transfers are executed automatically once pre-defined terms are met.
In addition, it can support so-called atomic settlement of both cash and securities legs of a transaction, so that neither side is exposed to the risk of one asset being delivered without the other.
Wholesale CBDCs, which are used only by financial institutions, are being explored as a way to improve the plumbing of money markets.
Singapore is among a number of financial centres testing such designs as central banks consider how distributed ledger technology could be applied in funding markets and cross-border transactions.
MAS said it plans to build on the pilot by testing the issuance of tokenised MAS Bills to primary dealers, with settlement to be carried out using the wholesale CBDC on the SGD Testnet.
The central bank said further details of that trial would be released in 2026.