Blockchain Payment in Singapore Planned for Consumer Rollout

Project Ubin, which is a blockchain-driven product of the Singapore Monetary Authority (MAS), is now ready for commercial launch.

MAS, the central bank of Singapore, announced today that Project Ubin is ready for commercial use. According to the MAS website, the scheme “is a joint project with the industry to study the use of blockchain technology and distributed ledger (DLT) for clearing and settlement of payments and securities”.

Phase 1 of the project included tokenizing the Singapore Dollar (SGD), in keeping with its specified timeline. It began in November 2016 and ended in March 2017. MAS has collaborated with over 10 leading industry players in different fields of finance and blockchain.

Phase 2 – Real-Time Gross Settlement Integration (RTGS). MAS turned to IBM, Microsoft, ConsenSys, R3, and Accenture to create a prototype.

At phases 3 and 4 of the project, the Delivery Versus Payment (DvP) and Payment Versus Payment (PvP) protocols were developed, respectively. DvP is a protocol for calculating payments between different blockchain networks, and PvP is for calculating cross-border payments.
The final phase of the project was to create a large prototype of the ecosystem and to test it with different currencies from around the world. MAS officially revealed the study was completed successfully.

MAS revealed plans to work with China to discuss digital currencies (CBDC) at the central bank in June 2020.

Singapore adopted a Payments Services Act earlier this year to direct the country’s crypto-exchange.

JPMorgan Tech
The prototype was developed in collaboration with Temasek, an investment firm owned by the Singapore government, and JPMorgan.

As the underlying infrastructure, it uses the JP Morgan quorum blockchain protocol and interacts with its Interbank Information Network (IIN) and JPM coin.

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