The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is postponing the implementation of the crypto rules for banks outlined by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS). While MAS intended to implement the rules in line with Basel’s 1 January 2026 target, it has pushed this back by a year. A key reason cited by MAS is the Basel Committee’s treatment of permissionless blockchains and the pushback on this from banks.
For example, say a bank holds a tokenized money market fund (MMF) from a major asset manager such as BlackRock. If this MMF is hosted on a permissionless blockchain, then its risk weighting is 1250%, the same as unbacked cryptocurrencies. On the other hand, if the…
