TradFi’s interest in blockchain finance is either about capital markets – collateralization, trading, investing, wheeling-dealing – or it’s about payments. And when I look at activity around the world, Singapore stands out as payments first.
Is this fair? There was a time (before FTX blew up), when Singapore Inc. was all-in on crypto. But the MAS has always approached anything blockchain-y from a payments approach. The field is regulated via the Payments Services Act, and when you look at some of the pioneering work in Singapore, it was projects geared around wholesale cross-border payments.
This makes sense, given Singapore’s status as an open port. But there’s also a cultural factor. Bluntly: Hong Kong was born out of the wheeling-dealing stuff, and HKEX outpaces Singapore as a stock market by a country mile. So there’s a whiff of Singaporean caution around blockchain finance. The MAS appears (to me) happy now to let Dubai or Hong Kong take the lead in the capital markets.
This doesn’t mean Singapore is sleeping on such activity. I invited Rehan Ahmed to help us understand what’s being built in the Lion City. Rehan is CEO of Marketnode, a digital market infrastructure operator. Marketnode runs two businesses, Gateway, a tokenization platform, and Fundnode, processing investment funds on-chain.
Marketnode is owned by “Singapore Inc” types including SGX and Temasek, as well as by HSBC and Euroclear, giving it relevance beyond Singapore. Indeed, it has a growing presence in Hong Kong and other APAC markets. And Rehan has an established career in the intersection of fixed income, funds, and digital assets.
Timecodes:
0:00 - Introducing Rehan Ahmed and Marketnode’s origins
6:20 - Supporting fund markets and transactions on-chain for institutions, and supporting tokenization - and new use cases
9:37 - Are crypto-native investors interested in TradFi’s tokenized products? Building to unify liquidity
15:50 - Where banks versus asset managers are focusing within real-world asset tokenization
19:48 - Competing with traditional fund-management processing networks
22:23 - Marketnode’s cross-border activities, eg Hong Kong
24:10 - Product roadmap beyond money-market funds
