DAS2026 Speakers Trade Tokenisation's Promise for Its Plumbing

The second Digital Assets Summit, organised by the Digital Assets Association in Singapore, ran under the theme of programmable finance. The more useful material came from the bankers, exchange operators and investigators on its panels, who described tokenisation as a slow integration problem with a long tail.

Derek Neo, head of market platforms and services at SGX Group, put a number on it. "Because this transition will take 5 to 15 years rather than a 'big bang', solving cross-rail interoperability is essential so we don't leave anyone behind," he said, adding that interoperability covers operational and legal integration between digital and traditional systems as well as technology.

Patrick Yeo, head of digital assets in global financial markets at DBS Bank, pointed to regulatory capital as a driver of which products are gaining ground. He said tokenised money market funds are seeing growing adoption because they offer a liquid alternative to stablecoins while avoiding "the RWA 1250% capital charge." That figure refers to the 1,250% risk weight that the Basel Committee's cryptoasset standard assigns to the riskiest category of crypto exposures, a treatment that makes holding many stablecoins on a bank balance sheet prohibitively expensive. Yeo also said stablecoin spending within DBS is rising and that users who get comfortable with wallets tend to move on to other tokenised assets.

SGX chief risk officer Ivan Han framed the next phase around specific frictions. "The next phase of programmable finance is about using programmability to solve real problems: Moving collateral more efficiently, reducing settlement friction, improving liquidity, and connecting markets that today remain fragmented," he said in his keynote.

The security panel was blunter. Jag Foo, chief security and policy officer at Safeheron, and DAC Gregory Kang, deputy commander of the Singapore Police Force's Cyber Command, both identified human decision-making as the weakest point in digital asset security. "Through our investigations, a (misguided) human decision is almost always involved in the leadup to an exploit or security breach," Kang said.

On the enforcement side, Heather Armstrong, the FBI's law enforcement attaché, said public-private collaboration on digital crime is working, but called for consistent reporting mechanisms across jurisdictions so investigators can act faster. Kenneth Farrugia, CEO of the Malta Financial Services Authority, made a similar point about cross-border information sharing, noting that licence holders often operate in several jurisdictions at once.

Senior Minister of State Desmond Tan, the guest of honour, and former deputy prime minister Heng Swee Keat, now chairman of the National Research Foundation, addressed the summit on workforce readiness and Singapore's longer-term positioning.

Chia Hock Lai, co-chairman of the Digital Assets Association, closed by arguing that the region now carries the industry's weight. "Asia is now the centre of gravity for this industry," he said. "Our regulators gave this industry rules early, and the firms in this room have to live up to it." His advice to firms included sharing incident postmortems alongside successes and staying close to regulators when progress is slow.

Blockhead was a media partner for DAS2026.