Singapore’s regulator hoped Global Layer One would become a common ledger for regulated finance. This month the project passed to a bank-run body that has so far published rules, not infrastructure.

Five of the world’s largest banks have taken control of Global Layer One, the Singapore-born project meant to give regulated finance a common ledger for tokenized assets. The ledger itself was never built.

GL1’s website announced the Global Layer One Organization on 4 November, describing it as an effort by global financial institutions to advance infrastructure for tokenized markets. Ledger Insights reported the founders as HSBC, Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, MUFG, Societe Generale FORGE and Standard Chartered. Citing sources, it also reported that the original goal of a shared open ledger fell short because the founders were reluctant to give up intellectual property rights, so the work turned to agreeing standards instead. The handover moves GL1 out of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which launched it under Project Guardian, and into the hands of the industry.

The distinction is more than technical. A set of standards tells banks how to build compatible systems. A shared ledger is a single system they all use. Guardian has so far delivered the first and not the second.

From Blueprint to Rulebook

MAS launched GL1 in 2023 as foundational infrastructure for Guardian. Its June 2024 whitepaper went further than standards. It described a “multi-purpose, shared ledger infrastructure” based on distributed ledger technology, governed by common standards and envisioned to be developed by regulated financial institutions, which firms across jurisdictions could use to issue tokenized assets. In November 2024, MAS widened GL1’s remit to include control principles for cross-border transactions, specifications for market infrastructures and asset lifecycles, and “compliance by design” templates.

What has been published since is toolkits. The Market Infrastructure Toolkit, now in its second version, is a framework that lets financial institutions and market infrastructure operators check their services against internationally recognized principles and standards across jurisdictions. On 22 June 2026, GL1 published a Programmable Compliance white paper, which describes how compliance rules can be built into tokenized transactions through a composable reference architecture, and said network operators had attested to the toolkit. In plain terms, programmable compliance means a transfer can be checked against rules, such as who is eligible to hold an asset, as it happens, instead of being reviewed afterwards.

MAS now appears on the GL1 site only as one of the listed policymakers, and the site does not describe its role in the new organization. Euroclear helped develop the toolkits but is not a founder, and the new body says it wants market infrastructures, fintechs and policymakers to join.

What Tokenization Changes, and Why a Shared Ledger Is Hard

A tokenized asset is a record of ownership, such as a fund share or a bond, held as a digital token on a ledger. Today every bank keeps its own books, and moving an asset between institutions means messages, reconciliation and often days of waiting. On a shared ledger there is one version of the record, and the asset and the payment for it can settle together.

The difficulty is that the biggest banks have already built their own platforms. J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys, for example has reported more than $1.5 trillion in cumulative transaction volume on its own network. Agreeing on one ledger means agreeing whose technology it runs on, who governs it and who owns the code. That is where the intellectual property reluctance reported by Ledger Insights becomes plausible, though it remains the account of the publication’s sources and not an official statement.

There is an alternative model where many networks connect through common standards. MAS and experts from the BIS’s payments committee examined that approach in a June 2023 Guardian paper on open and interoperable networks, which treats interoperability as a prerequisite for trading digital assets across different networks and pools of liquidity. By default, GL1 now looks like that second model.

The Savings Case Depends on It

In July 2025, an industry group led by ISDA and Ant International, with BNY, HSBC, OCBC and the Global Foreign Exchange Division of the GFMA, published a Guardian report on using tokenized bank liabilities and shared ledgers for foreign exchange settlement and cross-border payments. It argued that settlement could take minutes or even seconds, and that interoperability between bank solutions could allow payments around the clock, with currencies exchanged in real time.

The report also cited two outside estimates. A 2021 J.P. Morgan report put annual cross-border transaction fees at around $120 billion. A 2024 Deloitte analysis estimated that a universally accepted industry framework could cut costs by 12.5% and save more than $50 billion by 2030. Both are third-party figures, and the report frames the benefits as possibilities. The condition attached to the savings is the important part: they depend on a universally accepted framework. That is the job GL1 was meant to do, and a body led by five founding banks has to earn universal acceptance before it can claim it.

Where the Money Actually Is

On 13 November 2025, MAS, DBS, OCBC and UOB completed a live trial of interbank overnight lending using Singapore-dollar wholesale CBDC, the first live issuance of that currency, recorded in the banks official books, that means settlement activity exists, though it was small. MAS has also said it will test synchronized FX settlement with the Bank of England and the Bank of Thailand, building on Project Meridian FX.

MAS launched BLOOM in October 2025 and updated its page on 23 October 2026. It builds on Project Orchid and aims to extend settlement using tokenized commercial bank money and well-regulated stablecoins, across G10 and Asian currencies, with programmable controls such as identity checks and sanctions screening. Members now include DBS, OCBC, UOB, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, Visa, Mastercard, Circle, Stripe, Coinbase, Ripple and Ant International, along with Bank Negara Malaysia, the Bank of Thailand and the World Bank Group. MAS lists no specific pilots or milestones.

On the asset side, a group of banks formed the Guardian Wholesale Network in 2024 to commercialize their tokenization trials. UBS, a Guardian partner, launched its uMINT tokenized money market fund on Ethereum in November 2024, after a live tokenized fund pilot under Guardian in 2023. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries totaled about $10.9 billion in February 2026, with BlackRock’s BUIDL the largest at about $2.2 billion.

How It Compares

Guardian’s backers include the UK Financial Conduct Authority, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Banque de France, Deutsche Bundesbank, Japan’s Financial Services Agency, Switzerland’s FINMA, the IMF and the World Bank, alongside MAS. That regulator network is its main asset, and no comparable project has it.

The BIS’s Project Agora works on a different layer, testing tokenized central bank reserves and bank deposits for cross-border payments. The BIS page cites eight central banks overall and 28 institutions in its live tests, which settled about CHF 800,000 across 30 transactions in six currencies at roughly 80 seconds on average. MAS is not among Agora’s central banks, and neither project’s official pages mention the other. Switzerland’s Helvetia is narrower, settling tokenized assets with wholesale CBDC, and the Swiss National Bank has extended it to mid-2027 and added RTGS settlement.

The GL1 handover is the real news, and it says more than a launch would have. It shows where the hard problem in tokenization sits. The technology to put a bond or a fund on a ledger is not in question, and several banks already do it. What has proved difficult is getting competing institutions to agree who owns the shared layer. A regulator can convene them and publish a whitepaper, but it cannot make them surrender their own systems.

The outcome is a normal one for competing institutions, and the toolkits are useful. But it changes the claim usually made for Guardian. It is a credible forum where regulators and banks agree on standards. It is not yet the common infrastructure that cross-border tokenized trading needs, and the $50 billion savings case depends on that infrastructure being broadly shared.

The more important question is governance where standard body run by five global banks can set sensible rules, but it can also set terms that suit its founders. The site does not yet say how the board is chosen, whether non-founders can vote, or how rules are changed. Smaller banks and fintechs face the cost of conforming to standards they did not write. We need to watch for three signals: whether members beyond the largest banks join, whether the organization publishes its governance terms, and whether Guardian’s regulators, including the FCA, Japan’s FSA and FINMA, endorse its toolkits. Singapore has passed the burden of proof to the industry.

Guardian’s strength is its rulebooks, its regulator network and a few live pilots. Its biggest infrastructure ambition has been handed over without being built. The scale gap is still large, with tokenized Treasuries in the low tens of billions of dollars. Watch who joins the new organization next and whether its rules stay open.

Sources: MAS, Project Guardian; MAS, GL1 Whitepaper (27 June 2024); Global Layer One; MAS, Open and Interoperable Networks (26 June 2023); ISDA, Guardian FX report (3 July 2025); Allen & Gledhill on MAS’s November 2024 announcements; MAS, BLOOM and launch release (16 October 2025); MAS annual report 2025/26; BIS, Project Agora; UBS Asset Management, uMINT launch (1 November 2024); Bitcoin.com News on tokenized Treasuries (17 February 2026); Ledger Insights, “HSBC, JPM, 3 other G-SIBs set up GL1 non-profit to further tokenization standards” (5 November 2026, free preview only).