MAS Completes First Live Trial of Interbank Settlement Using Wholesale CBDC

Picture Credit: Reuters

In a major milestone for Singapore’s digital finance landscape, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced the successful completion of its first live trial for interbank overnight lending settlement using wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Conducted on the Singapore Dollar Test Network (SGD Testnet), the pilot marks a significant step toward real-world deployment of tokenised financial infrastructure.

The trial involved three of Singapore’s largest banks (DBS, OCBC, and UOB) and featured the first live issuance of Singapore dollar wholesale CBDC, with transactions formally recorded in each bank’s official ledgers and regulatory filings. The initiative demonstrates MAS’s commitment to exploring blockchain-based settlement systems that could make financial transactions faster, safer, and more efficient.

The SGD Testnet serves as a shared ledger platform that allows financial institutions to experiment with settlement of tokenised financial assets using wholesale CBDC. It delivers three core capabilities:

• A common settlement asset in the form of digital Singapore dollars to reduce market fragmentation and settlement risk.

• Programmability, enabling smart contracts to automatically execute payment conditions between counterparties.

• Multi-asset support, allowing the atomic settlement of cash and securities simultaneously, thereby eliminating time and system discrepancies.

  
  

Following this successful pilot, MAS plans to expand its experiments in 2026 by issuing tokenised MAS Bills to Primary Dealers, also settled using CBDC. The move reinforces Singapore’s position as a global leader in digital finance innovation and its ongoing efforts to build a tokenised, interoperable financial ecosystem that supports real-time, low-risk transactions.