Asean’s financial market is fragmented. Tokenisation could fix that

TOKENISATION turns ownership of an asset – a bond, a share, even a building – into a digital record that can be held and transferred electronically, with the asset’s rules built into the record.

The sector is growing rapidly. Industry trackers value tokenised assets, excluding stablecoins, at more than US$30 billion by mid-2026, up from about US$6 billion at the start of 2025.

Scale, however, remains elusive, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has acknowledged. In 2024, MAS deputy managing director Leong Sing Chiong said that no one has really succeeded in achieving scale, because projects sit on separate networks that cannot talk to one another, driving up costs and spreading buyers and sellers thin.