As Southeast Asia races toward a knowledge economy, the Philippines’s situation — highlighted in the Philippine Private Capital Report 2026 by Foxmont Capital Partners — offers a focused view of enduring challenges in education and workforce skills development that resonate across the region.

The recently formed Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II) points to execution gaps in the education system as major bottlenecks that limit the country’s productivity prospects. Addressing these gaps is essential not only for national growth but for the Philippines‘ role in an increasingly interconnected ASEAN market.

Education performance and economic growth

The Philippines continues to struggle with foundational literacy and numeracy relative to regional peers. Public schools consistently underperform compared with private institutions and neighbouring systems, and international assessments and regional comparisons repeatedly underscore that many Filipino students leave basic schooling without secure reading and arithmetic skills.

Also Read: The hidden tax on Philippine SMEs: Unreliable infrastructure

Because foundational learning is strongly correlated with long-term gains in GDP per capita, these shortfalls are not just educational but are economic. A large cohort lacking basic skills constrains the workforce’s ability to progress into higher-productivity roles, slows technology adoption, and weakens the country’s ability to attract and retain higher-value industries.

Beyond outcomes: system execution matters

EDCOM II’s findings are instructive because they shift attention from outcomes alone to the mechanisms that produce them. Persistent weaknesses in curriculum delivery, uneven teacher preparation and professional development, fragmented resource allocation, and gaps in local-level implementation combine to erode the system’s effectiveness.

In many classrooms, the curriculum is ambitious on paper but poorly supported in practice: teachers lack time, materials, or targeted training to teach for mastery; assessment systems focus on rote recall rather than competency; and administrative capacity at school and municipal levels is insufficient to monitor and support improvements.

These execution problems prevent the education system from reliably converting investment into learning. In turn, that reduces the supply of mid-level skilled workers—the technicians, supervisors, and specialist operators who typically drive productivity gains in manufacturing, services, and digital sectors.

The skills trifecta for productivity

The Foxmont report sensibly frames the transformation challenge as a three-part “skills trifecta”:

1. Strong foundational learning
2. Expansion of the mid-level skilled workforce
3. Accelerated reskilling to keep pace with rapidly evolving job requirements

All three elements are mutually reinforcing. Strong foundational skills (literacy, numeracy, digital basics) enable learners to acquire more advanced technical skills faster. A larger mid-level workforce creates career pathways that make reskilling attractive and viable. And rapid reskilling systems ensure that workers can transition across firms and sectors as automation and digitalisation change demand.

For the Philippines, which has a young population but faces rapid technological disruption and stiff regional competition, failing on any one leg of the trifecta risks turning demographic advantage into a liability.

Policy levers and institutional actors in the Philippines

Several existing institutions and reforms are relevant:

• K–12 and basic education reforms were intended to improve learning outcomes by extending years of schooling and revising curricula. However, extending the school year without parallel improvements in teaching quality, assessment, and resources has a limited impact.
• Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) institutions, including government training programmes, offer a natural platform to scale mid-level skills. Strengthening linkages between TVET providers and employers — and raising quality assurance standards — can make these programs more effective.

Also Read: Philippines’s quiet AI revolution is about work, not tech

• Lifelong learning infrastructure (including online platforms, modular credentials, and recognition of prior learning) remains embryonic. Expanding flexible upskilling pathways is critical.
• Local government units play a major role in implementation. Enhancing their capacity to manage education financing, data, and partnerships is a high-leverage intervention.

Industry-education alignment: emerging examples and opportunities

Partnerships between industry and education are multiplying in the Philippines. Sectoral initiatives—particularly in electronics, semiconductors, business process services, and logistics—are collaborating with technical colleges and training centers to co-design curricula, provide equipment and internships, and certify competencies that match employer needs. These school-to-industry pipelines create clearer routes from education into employment and help ensure training content is current with workplace technology.

Scaling such models requires policy support: incentives for firms to invest in workforce development; streamlined processes for private training providers to be accredited; and mechanisms to share costs and risk between government, firms, and learners. A national skills mapping and competency framework tied to industry clusters would help scale successful pilots into systemic solutions.

The digital divide and equitable access

Any strategy to build a knowledge economy must confront inequities. Urban and wealthier areas tend to have better schools, more teachers with advanced training, and faster internet access; rural and island communities often lag.

The pandemic highlighted this digital divide and the limits of one-size-fits-all remote learning. Investments in connectivity, appropriate devices, and teacher ICT training must be matched by investments in pedagogies that work in low-bandwidth and multi-grade settings.

Inclusive policies are also required for marginalised groups: out-of-school youth, learners with disabilities, and adults who missed earlier opportunities. Strengthening the Alternative Learning System (ALS) and creating modular, stackable credentials can help these populations re-enter pathways to mid-level employment.

Financing and incentives

Sustainable reform needs predictable financing and performance-based incentives. Shifting funding toward evidence-based interventions (teacher mentoring, remedial literacy programmes, assessment systems, and employer-linked training) will yield a higher return than blanket increases in inputs. Public-private financing mechanisms, such as matching funds for employer training or sectoral skills funds, can mobilise additional resources while aligning incentives toward job-relevant outcomes.

Also Read: “Skills intelligence” is the future of hiring, says LinkedIn’s Elsie Ng

Regional implications and ASEAN coordination

The Philippines’ education and skills bottlenecks are instructive for the broader Southeast Asian region. ASEAN economies share similar pressures: rapid technology adoption, aging in some countries, youthful demographics in others, and competition for investment in higher value-added industries.

Regional coordination can accelerate solutions:

• Shared competency frameworks and skills passports to facilitate labour mobility
• Cross-border training partnerships and recognition of certifications
  Joint investments in edutech and open learning resources adapted for Southeast Asian languages and contexts
• Prioritising foundational learning across the region and creating harmonised mid-level skill standards would raise the floor and expand the pool of workers ready for technology-intensive sectors.

Measuring success: data and accountability

Improved measurement is essential. Standardised assessments of foundational learning, timely labour market data, and tracer studies of graduates help policymakers identify what works and where to target resources. Transparent dashboards that track learning outcomes, teacher deployment, and industry training metrics would strengthen accountability and enable course corrections.

Education as economic strategy

The Philippines’s education challenge is not an isolated social issue; it is central to economic resilience and inclusive growth. Fixing execution gaps in basic education, expanding mid-level skill pipelines, and building rapid reskilling systems will determine whether the country (and the wider region) can capitalise on technological opportunities or fall into a growth trap of low-value activity.

Also Read: Why are skills the currency of the future business world?

Policymakers, educators, employers, and civil society must act in concert: invest where evidence shows biggest returns, align curricula with real-world demand, and build flexible, inclusive lifelong learning pathways. If done well, the Philippines can turn its demographic potential into sustained productivity gains and play a stronger role in Southeast Asia’s knowledge economy—creating more good jobs and broader shared prosperity along the way.

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Singapore-based quantum software startup Horizon Quantum Computing has completed its merger with dMY Squared, securing a Nasdaq listing and roughly US$120 million in gross proceeds.

The deal gives the company a far bigger war chest than it had as a private startup and offers an early test of whether investors are ready to back deep-tech SPAC stories again.

Also Read: Can SPACs avoid another reverse merger crisis?

Horizon Quantum Computing began trading on Nasdaq on March 20 under the ticker HQ after closing its business combination with dMY Squared Technology Group, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.

For Horizon, the attraction of a SPAC was fairly straightforward: speed, price certainty and access to US public-market investors without the longer, more fragile runway of a traditional IPO. That matters even more for a company like Horizon, which is building software infrastructure for quantum computing — a field long on promise, short on near-term revenues, and still difficult for mainstream investors to value using conventional yardsticks.

The Singapore-founded startup said the transaction delivered about US$120 million in gross proceeds before expenses. That is a meaningful jump from the roughly US$21 million in publicly disclosed private funding Horizon had raised since its founding in 2018, making the de-SPAC by far its biggest capital event to date.

The company plans to use the cash to expand research and development, build out its hardware testbed, and advance its quantum programming platform, Triple Alpha.

Chief executive and founder Joe Fitzsimons framed the listing as a bet that quantum computing would reach a turning point. “The field is reaching an inflection point,” he said, pointing to recent progress in quantum hardware and error correction.

That is the optimistic view. The harder question is whether public investors will buy into it.

Quantum computing has attracted increasing attention as companies race to turn laboratory advances into usable systems, but commercial timelines remain hazy. Horizon’s pitch is that it does not need to bet on one winning hardware architecture. Instead, it is building hardware-agnostic software tools that could sit above whichever quantum machines eventually scale.

That positioning also helps explain why a SPAC made sense. Unlike a conventional IPO, the SPAC route has historically given emerging technology companies more room to tell a forward-looking story, particularly when current revenues do not yet capture the scale of the opportunity they are chasing.

Still, Horizon Quantum’s deal should not be read as proof that the SPAC market is suddenly back in full force after its long slump. The frenzy of 2020 and 2021 ended badly for many companies, with poor post-listing performance, tighter regulation and rising interest rates draining enthusiasm from the structure. What has emerged since is not a broad revival, but a more selective market in which investors are willing to revisit deals with clearer strategic logic.

In that sense, Horizon Quantum looks less like a sign of another SPAC gold rush and more like a targeted exception: a deep-tech company with a specialised narrative, a US listing ambition and a need for substantial capital.

The transaction also adds Horizon to a still short list of Singapore-headquartered companies that have reached public markets through SPAC mergers. Publicly known examples include Grab, PropertyGuru, Bitdeer, and ESGL; with Horizon, the number is at least five.

That count is notable because Singapore has produced relatively few de-SPAC listings compared with the wave seen in the US, even as the city-state has become an increasingly important base for regional technology and deep-tech startups. Grab and PropertyGuru were consumer internet names. Bitdeer was tied to digital assets. Horizon now brings quantum software into that small club — a very different bet, and arguably a riskier one.

Also Read: The hidden danger in SPACs. Is the hype worth the risk?

The broader implication is that Southeast Asian startups are still willing to use alternative paths to the public market when a standard IPO does not quite fit. Whether that becomes more common again will depend less on nostalgia for the SPAC boom than on whether newly listed companies can show discipline after the bell rings.

For Horizon, the immediate milestone is clear enough: it now has Nasdaq access, fresh capital, and public-market scrutiny. The harder part begins now — proving that quantum software infrastructure can become a serious business before investor patience collapses into the nearest probability wave.

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Retail tech has spent years trying to make shops behave like websites. Online, every click, hover, and abandoned basket is measured and optimised until intent becomes revenue. In a supermarket or mall, that precision often vanishes: managers rely on instinct, a few CCTV feeds and yesterday’s numbers to guess what is happening now.

The offline blind spot in a data-driven retail world

Ulisse Ltd, led by CEO Luca Nestola, argues that blindness is expensive in Southeast Asia, where competition is fierce, and service expectations are rising. Its platform, Hyperspace, is built around what he calls “Physical AI”: software that analyses how crowds move and prompts staff to act before friction turns into lost sales at the shelf and checkout.

Also Read: Why retailers must think like tech companies to thrive in a data-driven economy

Nestola’s starting point is a mismatch between the digital and physical worlds. E-commerce tracks the customer journey end to end and adjusts constantly. Physical retail, despite accounting for about 85 per cent of sales, still runs with limited visibility.

Traditional analytics, often based on cameras or manual counts, tends to answer only what happened: how many people entered, where they went, and when footfall spiked. By the time reports land, the moment has passed.

Hyperspace is meant to behave more like a live control system, matching demand with capacity as conditions shift. In-store terms, capacity is open tills, staffed counters and space devoted to promotions so managers can intervene immediately.

Privacy-first analytics: why LiDAR beats cameras

That push for real-time action is paired with an equally firm stance on privacy. Hyperspace uses LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) rather than cameras, and Nestola claims it enables 100 per cent customer privacy by design.

LiDAR emits laser pulses to build a 3D map; it captures shapes and motion, not personal features. In Ulisse’s model, a shopper is a moving cluster of points, a trajectory with no personally identifiable information.

Nestola argues this matters in Southeast Asia as regulators tighten rules on data use, with Singapore’s PDPA a clear signpost. It lets retailers extract sophisticated analytics without compromising anonymity, a requirement for shoppers and for legal teams approving deployments.

With cameras, even if the video is later blurred, the raw footage still exists, creating compliance burdens. With LiDAR, Ulisse says, there is no face, no skin colour, no attribute to record. “Cameras identify individuals,” he says. “LiDAR understands movement.”

Designing for chaos: Southeast Asia’s diverse retail formats

Ulisse also had to design for the region’s diverse range of store formats. Hyperspace is layout-agnostic, built around a 3D Venue Builder and a LiDAR Coverage Planner. Retailers can upload a 2D architectural drawing, typically a DWG file, and the system parses it to generate an accurate 3D digital twin.

If plans do not exist, Ulisse can quickly create the layout using manual tools. Coverage is provided by scalable sensor fusion: multiple low-cost LiDAR units are installed, and their streams are stitched into a seamless view of the venue. The approach is meant to work across extremes, from a 100-square-metre convenience shop to a 10,000-square-metre hypermarket, and from tight city aisles to open-plan big-box floors, without sacrificing tracking quality or operational usefulness.

Operational gains at scale: where small improvements compound

Nestola sees Southeast Asia’s big opportunity as operational efficiency at scale. Retail is intensely competitive, and margins are often thin, so small gains in throughput and revenue per square metre compound quickly.

Hyperspace focuses on two daily drains on profit.

Queue management is first: the platform predicts queue formation and alerts staff to open additional checkouts before lines become long enough to trigger abandonment.

Second is staff and space allocation. By showing where customers are, and where they are not, managers can move staff to the right zones and rework promotions or layouts to monetise underused space. The pitch is practical: improve performance without a major refit so the same store can serve more shoppers each hour.

Also Read: AI shopping adoption surges 39 per cent in APAC, fueling retail tech investments

Ulisse will not name Southeast Asian clients, citing confidentiality agreements, but Nestola says pilots in the region echo work with European retailers such as Italy’s Esselunga. In one deployment with a major grocery chain in Singapore, Hyperspace was trained on checkout operations and the fresh produce section.

Ulisse says predictive alerts helped managers redeploy staff and cut average checkout wait times by 45 per cent during peak hours. The same retailer used foot-traffic and dwell-time analysis to reposition a key fresh fruit promotional display, and Ulisse reports a 22 per cent increase in category sales within the first month.

For him, the takeaway is simple: spatial analytics matters only when it becomes a decision quickly enough to change the customer experience on the floor, not paper.

Turning movement into money: decoding shopper intent

Hyperspace’s intent engine is built on what Nestola calls the “collective physics of shopping”: movement patterns, analysed at scale, become proxies for commercial intent. The system does not try to read individual psychology. Instead, it searches for repeatable signatures across thousands of anonymous trajectories.

A direct, accelerating path to the checkout signals purchase intent. Deceleration and repeated micro-stops in front of a shelf indicate consideration. A rise in dwell time and approach frequency around an endcap display versus baseline suggests promotional pull. When flow speed drops suddenly, or clusters form in odd places, Hyperspace flags friction—congestion, obstructions, confusion—so staff can intervene.

Ulisse says its core LiDAR tracking reaches over 99 per cent accuracy in detecting and continuously tracking shoppers anonymously. At the same time, queue prediction models have shown over 95 per cent accuracy in forecasting wait times—enough, Nestola argues, to act before queues become visible problems.

Measuring what matters: from footfall to causal impact

For in-store media, Ulisse offers PEBLE (Post-Exposure Behavioural Lift Engine), which aims to measure the causal impact of advertising. It compares the post-exposure behaviour of shoppers detected in front of a digital screen with that of a matched control group who were not exposed, an approach Ulisse says has been validated by Deloitte.

Hyperspace is designed to plug into existing retail systems, acting as a central nervous system. DOOH integrations can link an entrance ad for a new drink to later visits to the beverage aisle. POS links correlate traffic and dwell time with sales. Staff-management integrations route alerts to handheld devices, telling teams to open checkouts or assist in specific aisles in real time, store-wide.

Scaling without capex: a service-led business model

Ulisse’s go-to-market is shaped by cash flow realities, particularly for SMEs. Hyperspace is sold as LiDAR-as-a-Service, bundling hardware, software, installation and support into a monthly subscription with no upfront hardware bill. The model preserves capital—zero CAPEX—while delivering a typical payback period of under three months, and it lets retailers scale from one site to many without repeated big purchases.

Also Read: Chaos is a ladder: How instant retail is turning stores into fulfilment powerhouses

Even so, he expects two barriers: perceived complexity and resistance to change. Ulisse’s answer is a “30-minute deployment” playbook, automated floor-plan import and sensor placement, plus plug-and-play Ulisse Box edge servers. The system is framed as augmented intelligence: simple alerts that help managers act faster, not replacements for judgment. It targets post-pandemic shoppers who demand speed and less waiting.

Beyond retail: building a universal operating system for physical spaces

Hyperspace can monitor occupancy and flow to reduce overcrowding and help test new formats, such as dark stores. The system keeps learning as behaviour shifts. On the roadmap is AI Narrator, turning analytics into prompts—flagging that sales are down 15 per cent because an obstruction near the entrance is slowing traffic. Ulisse is focusing on grocery in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, then expanding into airports, malls and smart buildings with Kone as a partner. The end goal is a universal operating system for privacy-safe, high-performance spaces.

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Asia is entering a decisive decade for zero waste. What was once treated as a municipal housekeeping issue is now becoming a strategic agenda for industrial competitiveness, urban resilience, energy security, and inclusive growth. For business leaders, policymakers, and innovators, the central question is no longer whether zero waste is desirable. It is how fast the region can build the systems, incentives, and institutions to make it commercially durable and socially legitimate.

The opportunity is substantial. Asia is home to some of the world’s fastest-growing cities, largest manufacturing bases, and most dynamic startup ecosystems. It also generates enormous volumes of municipal, industrial, agricultural, and packaging waste. That combination creates a paradox: the region faces severe waste pressure, yet it also holds the largest market for solutions that can turn waste into value. In this sense, zero waste is not a niche environmental aspiration. It is a platform for new industries, new jobs, and new forms of competitiveness.

Why Asia matters

The region’s importance lies in scale and heterogeneity. On one end are highly industrialised economies with advanced recycling infrastructure, strong regulation, and growing circular-economy policies. On the other end are emerging markets where waste collection remains fragmented, informal workers play a vital role, and public systems often struggle with low separation rates. Between these extremes sit countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, and Malaysia, where policy ambition is rising faster than execution capacity.

This diversity is not a weakness. It is an advantage if the region treats zero waste as a modular transition rather than a one-size-fits-all doctrine. That means combining city-level pilots, corporate procurement reform, startup innovation, and national policy alignment. It also means recognising that the most effective interventions are often not the most glamorous. Better sorting, cleaner material flows, reuse logistics, composting, industrial symbiosis, and digital traceability can often unlock more value than highly visible but underperforming end-of-pipe solutions.

The new logic of zero waste

Zero waste used to be framed largely as a diversion from landfill. That remains important, but it is no longer enough. The stronger logic today is value retention. Every material that is reused, repaired, remanufactured, or biologically returned to the system avoids extraction, reduces emissions, and preserves economic value. In practice, zero waste is becoming a design principle for production systems, not just a disposal strategy.

Also Read: Long-duration energy storage: Key driver for region’s net zero goals

For enterprises, this shift changes the economics of sustainability. Waste is no longer just a cost centre. It becomes a signal of inefficiency, a source of input insecurity, and in many cases, a lost profit pool. Manufacturers can save by reducing scrap, optimising inventory, and redesigning products for durability and disassembly. Retailers can reduce packaging and logistics waste. Food companies can valorise organic residues into compost, feed, or bio-based materials. Technology firms can build platforms that improve sorting, traceability, and reverse logistics.

The winning models in Asia will likely be those that make zero waste easier, cheaper, and more reliable than linear alternatives.

Where enterprise opportunity is strongest

The commercial opportunities are concentrated in sectors that generate large waste streams and face growing costs or regulatory pressure.

• Manufacturing is perhaps the most immediate opportunity. Factories can deploy lean production, digital monitoring, predictive maintenance, and closed-loop material systems to reduce defects and scrap. This is especially relevant in electronics, automotive, textiles, metals, and chemicals. Manufacturers that can document lower waste intensity also gain credibility with global buyers, who increasingly demand traceability and ESG performance.
• Food and agriculture offer another major frontier. Asia produces and consumes enormous quantities of food, yet post-harvest losses, packaging waste, and organic waste disposal remain severe. Startups can build businesses around cold-chain optimisation, food-waste recovery, composting, bio-inputs, and surplus redistribution. In many markets, the prize is not only environmental. It is food security and cost efficiency.
• Plastics and packaging remain among the most visible pain points. Reusable packaging systems, refill models, extended producer responsibility services, and advanced sorting technologies can all create viable business models. Enterprises that help brands comply with recycled-content requirements, take-back rules, or packaging reduction targets can position themselves as indispensable infrastructure providers.
• Textiles and apparel are especially important in Southeast Asia, where manufacturing density is high, and waste from cutting, dyeing, and consumer disposal is significant. Innovations in design-for-disassembly, fibre recovery, resale platforms, and textile sorting can transform what was once treated as waste into feedstock.
• Construction and demolition materials represent another overlooked opportunity. Reuse of aggregates, modular design, and material passports can substantially reduce waste while improving resource security in rapidly urbanising economies.

The startup advantage

Tech startups are likely to play an outsized role in the next phase of zero-waste development because they can solve the coordination failures that have long constrained the sector. Traditional waste systems are often fragmented, data-poor, and slow to adapt. Startups can introduce speed, visibility, and user-centred design.

The most promising startup categories include:

• Material intelligence platforms, which use data to track waste flows, contamination rates, and recovery potential.
• AI-enabled sorting and auditing tools, which help facilities improve recovery rates and reduce manual error.
• Reverse logistics platforms, which connect collection, aggregation, and resale more efficiently.
• Reuse and refill infrastructure, which digitises packaging returns and incentives.
• Industrial by-product marketplaces, which match one company’s waste stream with another’s input demand.
• Organic waste conversion businesses, which transform food and agricultural residues into compost, soil inputs, or biochemical feedstocks.

Also Read: Asia’s climate–health gold rush is just getting started

The startup opportunity is especially strong in Asia because the region combines high waste volumes with uneven service quality. Where formal systems are incomplete, entrepreneurial platforms can leapfrog legacy models. Where large corporations face compliance pressure, startups can become technology partners. And where municipalities struggle with limited budgets, digital tools can improve efficiency without requiring immediate full-scale infrastructure replacement.

What business leaders should do

For senior executives, zero waste should be managed as a strategic transformation, not a side program. The first step is to move from broad commitments to a measurable material strategy. That requires identifying the top waste streams, the most expensive losses, and the most recoverable materials across operations and supply chains. The second step is to align procurement, product design, operations, and logistics around a shared resource-efficiency agenda.

A practical corporate roadmap usually includes five moves:

• Map material flows and identify the highest-value waste streams.
• Set product and process redesign priorities.
• Build partnerships with recyclers, refillers, and logistics operators.
• Use digital tools to measure performance and verify claims.
• Link waste reduction to cost, resilience, and market access.

The smartest companies in Asia will not frame zero waste as a burden. They will present it as a way to reduce input risk, strengthen customer loyalty, improve compliance readiness, and attract capital.

The policy imperative

Private ambition cannot succeed without public architecture. Asia needs policy frameworks that reward prevention rather than only disposal. That means stronger extended producer responsibility systems, recycled-content rules, green public procurement, landfill controls, eco-design standards, and incentives for reuse infrastructure. It also means support for informal and semi-formal waste workers, who remain essential in many Asian cities and must be integrated rather than displaced.

Governments should also focus on the enabling conditions that make zero waste scalable: standardised measurement, transparent data, stable financing, and procurement that creates demand for circular goods and services. Cities can act as powerful laboratories by piloting separate collection, pay-as-you-throw systems, repair hubs, and reuse pilots. National governments can then codify what works and remove barriers to replication.

Also Read: Turning crisis into capital: Indonesia’s climate x health pivot gains global attention

The most effective policies will be those that combine regulation with market creation. In other words, they will not only restrict wasteful behaviour. They will build markets for better alternatives.

The path ahead

Zero waste in Asia will not advance through rhetoric alone. It will advance through business models that work, policies that reward better behaviour, and institutions that convert ambition into implementation. That is why the most important phrase in the next phase may not be “zero waste” itself, but “zero waste ecosystem.”

That ecosystem includes cities, factories, startups, financial institutions, universities, ministries, and communities. It also includes the forums, networks, and coalitions that connect them. The challenge is to shift from isolated pilots to systems that can scale. The opportunity is to make zero waste a source of industrial renewal, urban livability, and inclusive prosperity.

Asia has the scale, urgency, and entrepreneurial energy to lead this transition. With the right policy design, business leadership, and convening platforms, the region can do more than manage waste better. It can redefine what growth looks like in a resource-constrained century.

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Singapore’s digital asset market is moving into a more demanding phase, where trust, regulation and staying power matter more than momentum alone. For firms operating across multiple jurisdictions, including Singapore, this shift is changing what it takes to build in this market, and why firms shaped by stronger systems and discipline may be better placed for what comes next.

A tougher market is taking shape

Over the past year, Singapore’s digital asset market has started to feel meaningfully different. The conversation is no longer about whether the sector has a future here, but about who gets to shape it and to what standard.

That shift became especially clear in June 2025, when the Monetary Authority of Singapore stated that firms based in Singapore and providing digital token services only to customers overseas would need to be licensed from 30 June 2025, while also indicating in public communications that licenses would not be generally issued.

At the same time, MAS has continued to back work on tokenised finance through Project Guardian, which signals that Singapore still sees promise in this space, but wants it to develop on firmer and more credible ground.

I do not see that as a contradiction, but a sign of a market becoming more mature about what it wants to encourage and what it wants to avoid. For a long time, digital assets were judged by their loudest personalities and their boldest claims, which made it easy for attention to run ahead of trust.

A more regulated market changes that balance, because it puts far more weight on whether a business can explain how it works, manage risk responsibly and build something with lasting value. As someone building in this space through Caladan, I have seen how much stronger markets become when trust and discipline matter more than momentum.

How this gap became impossible to ignore

That is also what drew me into this space in the first place. My background was in quantitative trading, where I spent time at Tower Research and Citadel, and that shaped how I looked at digital asset markets from the beginning. What stood out to me was not simply the volatility or the excitement around crypto, but how much of the market still felt unfinished.

Also Read: In digital assets, trust is the product

The infrastructure was uneven, the tools were still catching up, and there were clear gaps between how these markets operated and how more mature financial markets were expected to function. Caladan’s own public profile reflects that path, including my earlier roles and the company’s emphasis on technology-driven trading.

One early example was the Kimchi premium, when Bitcoin traded at a much higher price in Korea than in other markets. While many saw it as an unusual market event, I saw it as a sign of something more fundamental. This was going to be a market that remained highly fragmented, with significant room for better systems and stronger execution.

In the early days, that was the gap I found most interesting. The opportunity was never just about taking part in a fast-moving market. It was about helping build the technology and decision-making infrastructure that a growing market would eventually need.

Why Singapore made sense

Singapore became the right place to build that kind of company because it offered something much more valuable than excitement. It offered seriousness. In fast-moving sectors, regulation is often framed as something that slows progress down, but that has never been how I see it. A serious market needs standards, because standards are what allow trust to accumulate over time. Without them, any sector risks becoming defined by short-term momentum rather than long-term credibility.

For firms operating across proprietary trading and institutional markets, with activities subject to different regulatory frameworks across jurisdictions, Singapore remains an important base. It has the talent, connectivity and institutional depth to support innovation, but it also expects businesses to take governance and responsibility seriously. That combination matters a great deal in digital assets, where it has often been easier to generate attention than to earn confidence.

Building from  Singapore means a company cannot rely on hype alone. It has to show that it can operate responsibly, explain how it works, hold up under closer scrutiny, and be prepared to meet increasing regulatory scrutiny, which is a harder environment in some ways, but also a healthier one if the goal is to build something that lasts. 

Also Read: SBI bets on Singapore to build Asia’s digital asset corridor

What this new phase reward

As the market matures, the qualities that matter are changing with it. For years, digital assets rewarded speed, visibility and confidence, and in a looser environment, those qualities could carry a company quite far. In a more demanding market, they are no longer enough on their own. What starts to matter more is whether a business has sound systems, a clear operating model and the discipline to keep building even after the easier optimism fades.

That is why I believe this next chapter will favour businesses that were built with stronger foundations from the outset. In markets with lighter oversight, weak structures can be hidden for a while because momentum does the work of credibility.

In a more regulated one, those weaknesses become harder to ignore, and what stands out instead is whether a firm can respond well to scrutiny, operate with consistency and build with a long view in mind. In that sense, a maturing market is not something to fear. It is what allows the sector to become more useful, more dependable and ultimately more sustainable.

Also Read: Singapore crypto adoption hits new high as 61 per cent now hold digital assets

A clearer market can be a stronger one

What is happening in Singapore’s digital asset market is a raising of standards that is setting clearer expectations for participants. The market is becoming clearer about what kind of businesses it wants to host, and that is likely to reshape who lasts and who does not.

I see that as a positive development, because a maturing market should make it harder to impress with noise and easier to recognise who has built with substance. For firms operating in digital assets, that does not make Singapore less attractive. It makes it a more meaningful place to build.

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