Magic Circle firm Clifford Chance has advised JP Morgan and SBI Digital Assets Holdings on the first successful industry pilot in Singapore for cross-currency transactions on tokenised deposits.

As part of the pilot, JP Morgan and SBI completed their first live foreign exchange transaction with tokenised Japanese yen and Singapore dollar deposits.

The two organisations are participants in a collaborative initiative with the finance industry that the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) launched in May. Project Guardian, the MAS said in a statement, seeks to explore the economic potential and value-adding use cases of asset tokenisation, which is the process of digitally representing assets or items of value through a smart contract on a blockchain.

A Clifford Chance team led by partner Lena Ng assisted in preparing an inter-party agreement detailing the execution of the landmark transaction. The CC team also advised on the regulatory treatment of these tokenised liabilities under Singapore law.