The second Digital Assets Summit (DAS2026) concluded in Singapore on 8 October 2026 with a pronounced shift from asking whether digital assets belong in institutional finance to determining how programmable finance should be built. Organised by the Digital Assets Association under the theme Programmable Finance, the event brought together policymakers, exchanges, banks, custodians and law-enforcement agencies ahead of TOKEN2049 week.
Danny Chong, Co-Chairman of the Digital Assets Association, said last year’s theme, “Shaping the Future of Finance,” had given way to a more practical mandate. “Our focus has evolved from connection to construction,” he told attendees, arguing the summit was no longer about convincing participants that tokenisation is the future, but about establishing what needs to be true for tokenisation to be the future.
Several speakers stressed that tokenisation will be a gradual integration rather than a single switch. Derek Neo, Head of Market Platforms and Services at SGX Group, estimated the transition will take five to 15 years and said interoperability must cover operational, legal and cross-rail integration between digital and traditional systems. Patrick Yeo, Head of Digital Assets in Global Financial Markets at DBS Bank, pointed to regulatory capital as a key driver, noting tokenised money market funds are gaining adoption as liquid alternatives to stablecoins because they avoid the 1,250% risk weight under the Basel Committee’s cryptoasset standard. He also said stablecoin spending inside DBS is rising and wallet familiarity often leads users into other tokenised assets.
Former Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat, now Chairman of the National Research Foundation, highlighted five forces shaping Singapore’s next decade: deglobalisation, decarbonisation, demographics, digitalisation and distribution. On security, Jag Foo of Safeheron and DAC Gregory Kang, Deputy Commander of the Singapore Police Force Cyber Command, both said human error remains the weakest link. Kang said investigations show a misguided human decision is almost always involved before an exploit. On enforcement, FBI law enforcement attaché Heather Armstrong called for more consistent cross-jurisdictional reporting mechanisms, while Malta Financial Services Authority CEO Kenneth Farrugia emphasised that licence holders often operate in several jurisdictions and require stronger cross-border information sharing. Closing the summit, Chia Hock Lai, Co-Chairman of the Digital Assets Association, said Asia is now the industry’s centre of gravity and urged firms to share incident postmortems and stay close to regulators.
