Three world leaders of the banking industry are taking part in Project Guardian, an initiative from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) that aims to pilot use cases of digital assets and decentralized finance (DeFi).
JPMorgan, DBS Bank and SBI Digital Asset Holdings just completed the first live trades for the program’s first industry pilot, where they traded tokenized government bonds and executed foreign exchange transactions using tokenized Japanese yen (JPY) and Singapore dollars (SGD).
According to the MAS, the pilot shows that tokenized assets can be traded, cleared and settled instantaneously, which can bring down the costs of cross currency transactions.
Says MAS chief fintech officer Sopnendu Mohanty,
“The live pilots led by industry participants demonstrate that with the appropriate guardrails in place, digital assets and decentralized finance have the potential to transform capital markets. This is a big step towards enabling more efficient and integrated global financial networks.”
Umar Farooq, chief executive officer of JPMorgan’s blockchain unit Onyx, tells CNBC that the blockchain-based transactions were a first for the banking industry and called for precautionary measures against potential security issues.
“It was the first time we had tokenized deposits. I actually think it’s the first time any bank in the world has tokenized wallets on a public blockchain.
Using public blockchain, we had to spend a lot of time thinking through identity. We did lots of audits of smart contracts because again – they were publicly visible. And finally, it was using a protocol to actually make it all happen. It’s a lot of managing the risks. All of these were firsts for us.”
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