Every year, millions of people travel through Singapore's Changi Airport. In 2024, 67.7 million people passed through its terminals. Ranked the World’s Best Airport by Skytrax, Changi’s reputation is built upon an ecosystem that includes customs, immigration, security, airlines, retail, and a wide range of service providers, all working together across a common foundation. Together, they enable the large-scale movement of people with precision and consistency.
Today, Singapore is applying this same systems-level thinking from a global aviation hub to something even more complex: the movement of money itself.
At the heart of this shift is a simple but radical truth: money is no longer just a medium of exchange or a store of value. Money is not just powered by technology. In blockchain-based systems, money becomes technology itself. Money doesn't just flow through systems: it becomes the system, carrying its own logic and executing trust through code.
This redefinition enables capital to become programmable, accountable, and transparent, operating as a system that never sleeps and constantly adapts. Trust is no longer assumed, but encoded in blockchain logic and enforced through smart contract code. This allows peer-to-peer transactions to scale with people’s needs, down to fractions of a cent per transaction, laying the foundation for truly inclusive finance. Imagine paying your contractors in Africa and the Philippines from Singapore with the same stablecoin, same fee; no middlemen. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s already happening.
This transformation demands a new kind of stewardship. Not the stewardship of physical assets or traditional institutions, but the stewardship of trust itself in its most programmable form. Risk controls would still apply. Code would still be subject to human oversight. The level of automation unlocked by blockchain technology reflects a paradigm shift similar to what we are beginning to see with artificial intelligence.
Decentralized, peer-to-peer finance may run on open protocols much like the internet, but its real-world impact depends on the governance frameworks behind the technology. The stewardship challenge of our time is not technical. It is about how we govern for trust at scale, across emerging digital ecosystems with clarity, accountability, and inclusion.
Just as Changi Airport thrives through coordinated interaction among its ecosystem of stakeholders, the financial infrastructure of the future will rely on how its layers of trust communicate, verify, and execute across both public and private systems. Airlines operate within shared international codes and publicly supported infrastructure because air travel is treated, at least in part, as a public good. Finance, too, can be designed this way: open, interoperable, and built to serve everyone.
This future is what Singapore has been quietly anticipating and building for: a series of modular, blockchain-based initiatives that function as living blueprints for financial architecture. Project Ubin, launched in 2016 by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), explored cross-border digital currencies and evolved into Partior, a blockchain-based clearing network now processing real transactions between major financial institutions. Project Orchid explored programmable money, currency that could be designed for specific purposes and time periods, paving the way for innovations like Grab's Web3 wallet. Project Guardian brought institutional players like Franklin Templeton and DBS together to pilot the tokenization of real-world assets, demonstrating how traditional investment products could operate with blockchain-native transparency and efficiency.
These initiatives are not isolated pilots. Together, they form the early architecture of what is becoming an “onchain state”: a national ecosystem where financial products, policy, and people converge on transparent, programmable infrastructure.
The numbers from Singapore’s Onchain State Report tell a compelling story of institutional confidence. In 2024 alone, MAS issued thirteen new Digital Payment Token licenses, bringing the total to twenty-nine certified players in the ecosystem. Seventy-five percent of local Web3 companies plan to expand their teams this year, signaling market confidence even amid global economic uncertainty. Meanwhile, Bitcoin ETFs concluded 2024 with over $101 billion in assets, representing not speculation but infrastructural investment in custody, settlement layers, and the rails that support institutional adoption.
Underlying these developments is a broader transformation in global capital markets. Today, only $25 trillion in global securities are eligible to be used as collateral in financial markets. Through tokenization and smart contract logic, over $230 trillion in assets could potentially be unlocked, creating liquidity and efficiency at scale.
The question is no longer whether this transformation will happen. Singapore’s leadership and institutional adoption already point the way. The real question is whether we will shape this new financial architecture with intention and purpose, or watch its foundations be laid without us.
Posted 04/09/2025
