The Digital Assets Summit 2026 wrapped up on 6 Oct with panels on tokenisation, regulation, and cross-border coordination.
The Digital Assets Association (DAA) Singapore’s Digital Assets Summit 2026 (DAS2026) brought together speakers and industry partners from financial institutions and examined the growing use of digital assets plus the changing role of financial intermediaries. Here are some of the key points from the event:
Fireside Chat with Mr Heng Swee Keat
Mr Heng Swee Keat, Chairman of the National Research Foundation and former Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, held a fireside chat with Tan Chong Huat, Chairman of SDAX Exchange and RHTLaw Asia, on the technologies shaping today’s financial world.
Heng framed Singapore’s next decade around five structural shifts he called the “5 Ds”: deglobalisation, decarbonisation, demographics, digitalisation, and distribution. He highlighted that AI, quantum computing, and blockchain continue to redefine global systems, and drew on Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s governance principle that Singapore needs to stay relevant to the international community.
Scaling Tokenisation and Unlocking Next-Gen Markets
Daniel Lee, CEO of Cactus Custody, moderated a panel on tokenisation at scale with Wai Lum Kwok of ADGM, Derek Neo of SGX Group, Benjamin Versluijs of Northern Trust, and Patrick Yeo of DBS Bank.
Yeo said tokenised money market funds are seeing increasing adoption and pointed to rising stablecoin spending within DBS as a gateway that gets users comfortable managing wallets before they move into broader tokenised investments.
He closed with his outlook that tokenisation’s next phase will require treating it as “the next generation of financial rules,” with agentic AI helping to catalyse adoption among organisations.
Fireside Chat with Kenneth Farrugia
Kenneth Farrugia, CEO of the Malta Financial Services Authority, spoke with Money FM 89.3 anchor Lynlee Foo on keeping innovation and regulation moving at the same pace. Farrugia said MFSA constantly consults industry on policy guidance to ensure all feedback is heard, and supplements that consultation by sharing experiences directly between regulators and firms.
He closed with advice for both sides: compliance is costly in the short term but worth it over the long term for firms, while regulators need greater cross-border collaboration.
Institutionalisation of Digital Assets
Jag Foo, Chief Security and Policy Officer at SafeHeron, joined June Lau of Elliptic, David Peters of Gelephu Mindfulness City, and DAC Gregory Kang of the Singapore Police Force’s Cyber Command to discuss what institutional-grade security actually requires.
Foo described five components of institutional-grade infrastructure: avoiding single points of failure through checks and balances, building a layered defence strategy to raise the cost of attacks, maintaining a strong audit trail, meeting industry infrastructure standards, and keeping cryptographic agility to adapt quickly to emerging technology.
On vulnerabilities, DAC Kang echoed Foo’s view that human decisions carry the greatest risk, noting that investigations almost always find a misguided human decision in the lead-up to an exploit or security breach.
Regulations, Interoperability, and Coordination
Otto Jacobsson, Chapter Lead of the Digital Assets Association UK and CEO of YAP Global, moderated the day’s final panel on connecting the global financial system through regulation, interoperability, and global coordination.
Asked for an example of cross-border coordination working over the past year, Armstrong agreed with Kang that public-private collaboration is changing how the industry approaches the evolving landscape of digital crime. Vyas argued for more public education on what happens behind a transaction, noting that while the goal is to make crypto as frictionless as possible, certain frictions are deliberately built in to protect customers.
Armstrong closed by calling for greater consistency of reporting mechanisms across jurisdictions, arguing that standardising reporting methods would streamline decision-making and let law enforcement act faster.
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