DBS Bank
DBS, J.P. Morgan and SBI Digital Asset Holdings said they had run the first Project Guardian pilot: foreign exchange and government bond trades against permissioned DeFi liquidity pools of tokenised deposits and bonds on a public blockchain.
- Status
- Dead
- Announced
- (announcement)
- Stage
- Pilot
- Chain or network
- Polygon PoS
- Participants
- J.P. Morgan (Onyx), SBI Digital Asset Holdings
- Next review
- None
Scorecard
As of the review on . Changes since the previous review are marked. How pilots are scored
| Ledger | Permissioned tokens on a public chain |
|---|---|
| Settlement | Tokenised deposits |
| Access | Closed |
| Legal standing | Sandbox or exemption |
| Scale | Single transaction |
Review history
Live Pilot
One live cross-currency trade between tokenised SGD and JPY on a permissioned Aave pool on Polygon; the government bond trades were simulated. The participants' white paper describes the live trade as an isolated proof of concept under a zero profit-and-loss arrangement, hence sandbox and single.
Evidence: mas.gov.sg, dbs.com, dbs.com
Dead Pilot
No further trades by this pilot since November 2022. Searched the MAS Project Guardian page, the DBS newsroom and J.P. Morgan's Kinexys institutional DeFi page; none report a second trade or a successor with the same participants and design. Quiet for more than 24 months, so dead.
Evidence: mas.gov.sg, jpmorgan.com
What was announced
On 2 November 2022 the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said the first industry pilot under Project Guardian, its programme for testing asset tokenisation and decentralised finance (DeFi), had completed its first live trades. DBS Bank, J.P. Morgan and SBI Digital Asset Holdings traded foreign exchange and government bonds against liquidity pools of tokenised Singapore Government Securities, Japanese Government Bonds, Japanese yen and Singapore dollars. MAS said one cross-currency trade in tokenised JPY and SGD deposits was live and the bond trades were a simulated exercise. DBS’s release the same day called it a test trade in permissioned DeFi pools.
How it works
The participants’ joint white paper, Institutional DeFi: The Next Generation of Finance?, gives the design. The pilot ran on the Polygon public blockchain. Workstream one used SGD tokenised deposits issued by J.P. Morgan and JPY tokenised assets issued by SBI Digital Asset Holdings, traded through a modified, permissioned version of the Aave lending protocol. Workstream two applied the Uniswap exchange protocol to foreign exchange and bond trades between DBS and SBI entities. Access was limited by W3C Verifiable Credentials (signed digital identity attestations) that regulated “trust anchor” institutions issued to their own traders.
The public ledger with credential-gated pools gives public-permissioned; the bank-issued cash tokens give tokenised-deposit; only the three pilot institutions could trade, so closed.
Record so far
The pilot made no forward commitments. MAS closed its announcement by inviting further industry proposals, which is not a commitment by the participants.
At the first review, on 2 November 2022, the record was one live trade and a simulated bond exercise. The white paper describes the live trade as an isolated proof of concept under a bilateral arrangement to recognise zero profit and loss. That is why the rubric records sandbox for legal status and single for scale, and why the stage is pilot rather than production: real assets moved, but only once and only between the three participants.
After November 2022, MAS, DBS and J.P. Morgan published no further transactions under this pilot. Project Guardian went on with other pilots and other participants, which belong in their own entries. The pilot has been quiet since 2022 and is recorded as dead.
For Ethereum
Polygon PoS runs the Ethereum Virtual Machine, so the pilot tested whether bank-issued tokens could sit in adapted Ethereum DeFi code (Aave and Uniswap) on a public network. Compliance was enforced at the pool level: the Aave deployment checked each trade against a Verifiable Credential before accepting it. No contract addresses or transaction hashes were published, so the trade cannot be checked on-chain.
What to watch
Nothing is scheduled. A new trade by the same participants on the same design would reopen this entry; a successor with a different design gets its own entry.