Despite the cryptocurrency sector growing exponentially, financial authorities and regulators in some countries remain skeptical of assets such as Bitcoin (BTC), including in Singapore, where the city-state’s central bank is going as far as warning against their trading.
Responding to a parliamentary question on August 1, which concerned licenses awarded to digital payment token (DPT) service providers in Singapore, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Senior Minister and Minister in charge of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) explained that:
“MAS is involved in international regulatory discussions, which are seeing growing consensus on the need to step up oversight of the industry for this purpose. Domestically, MAS is also enhancing our regulatory framework, and will be consulting on the proposed measures in the next few months.”
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Crypto risks warrant warnings
In addition, Shanmugaratnam stressed that his organization remained cautious where cryptocurrencies are concerned, reflected in its advice against any involvement in trading such assets:
“We will also continue to actively discourage retail participation in cryptocurrency trading, which MAS has repeatedly warned is plainly hazardous.”
Commenting on the hazards resulting from the recent crypto market collapse and the threat of their spread to Singapore, Shanmugaratnam explained that the nation was safe in this sense.
As he said, Singapore’s “key financial institutions do not have significant exposures to either distressed cryptocurrency firms or cryptocurrencies more broadly. Spillover to the domestic financial system has thus been very limited.”
Praise mixed with harsh stance
Elsewhere, in late June, MAS’s chief fintech officer Sopnendu Mohanty praised the progress that the crypto industry and its leaders, such as Binance, have achieved so far, including developing secure and sustainable innovations to address real-world problems.
The praises arrived a few days after Mohanty expressed his organization’s pledge to be “brutal and unrelentingly hard” on bad actors in the digital asset sector and brought into question the value of private crypto assets, as Finbold reported.
Back in January, MAS issued guidelines to discourage retail speculations in a variety of assets it considered volatile, including shutting down all active cryptocurrency ATMs in the country.
