Cody McGrath 
The head of Singapore’s Central Bank says that this approach is “synergistic” and that price speculation is the cause of the problems in the crypto world.
Ravi Menon, managing director of Singapore’s Central Bank, said that the bank wants to promote a digital asset ecosystem while putting limits on crypto speculation (MAS).
Menon said in his opening remarks at a Green Shoots Seminar on Monday that this point of view is not contradictory. During Green Shoots sessions, people in the financial services community learn about new products and policies and hear the news.
After a number of well-known crypto firms with ties to Singapore, like Three Arrows Capital and Vauld, went out of business earlier this year, the MAS and other regulators in the country have been cracking down on the local crypto space with more force.
In particular, the MAS wants to make sure that retail crypto investors in the country are better protected. Menon said this again in his speech on Monday.
Menon says that while the digital asset ecosystem uses blockchain, distributed ledger technology, and tokenization to allow “anything of value to be represented in digital form and to be stored and traded on a ledger that keeps an immutable record of all transactions,” cryptocurrencies are just “heavily speculated on” and their prices “have nothing to do with any underlying economic value.”
“Cryptocurrencies have taken on a life of their own outside of the distributed ledger,” Menon said. “This is where the problems in the crypto world come from.”
Instead, the MAS is working to actively promote the digital asset ecosystem, which includes the tokenization of financial assets like cash and bonds, real assets like artwork and property, and intangible items like carbon credits and computing resources.
“I hope this presentation has made it clear that MAS’s approach to digital asset activities, which is to make them easier, and its approach to cryptocurrency speculation, which is to make it harder, are not at odds with each other. It’s a synergistic and all-around plan to make Singapore an innovative and responsible global hub for digital assets “Menon said.