Singapore’s DigiFT Wins Regulatory Approvals From MAS After Graduating From Sandbox

DigiFT, a digital assets exchange, has received Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) authorization to operate collective investment schemes as well as an “organized market,” or secondary-market trading, according to Henry Zhang, the Singapore-based company’s founder & CEO.

The exchange was granted the central bank’s Capital Markets Services (CMS) license on Tuesday and a Recognised Market Operator (RMO) license on Dec. 1, Zhang said in an interview.

Singapore has been trying to find the right balance between regulation and innovation in crypto. Recently, MAS Managing Director Ravi Menon said “Cryptocurrencies have failed the test of digital money” while highlighting ways the technology can be used aside from crypto speculation.

DigiFT’s recognition from MAS comes after an 18-month process that saw it go through the central bank’s FinTech Regulatory Sandbox.

“DigiFT is the first exchange with an automatic market making (AMM) mechanism to have been admitted into the MAS FinTech Regulatory Sandbox,” said Zhang. AMM is the underlying protocol that powers all decentralized exchanges (DEXs), eliminating the need for centralized exchanges.

“The MAS admits innovative business models to their regulatory sandbox to observe such models within a controlled environment, and one needs to graduate from the sandbox in order to receive full licenses,” Zhang said. “No other business model with an AMM mechanism has been admitted to the sandbox. As the first regulated exchange on the public blockchain to use an AMM mechanism for secondary trading, we will continue to push the frontier of innovation, including with the tokenization of real-world assets.”

Built on the Ethereum blockchain, DigiFT’s platform will offer secondary trading liquidity for security tokens backed by real-world assets such as bonds and equities, meaning investors can subscribe, trade and redeem on-chain assets using fiat currency or stablecoins.