“Fortune favours the brave.” These are the words spoken by Matt Damon as he peers into the vast unknowns of our cosmos.
Just months before, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) ordered the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange platform, Binance.com, to stop its services in the sunny island state.
Now, as we prepare to usher in the new year with enigmatic crypto adverts playing in the background, it sure looks as if Singapore has switched sides and is finally ready to be seen as a global cryptocurrency hub.
What changed?
The short answer is, nothing much. For years, Singapore has consistently worked to establish itself as the fintech hub of the world. Results thus far have been promising.
Since 2016, MAS has repeatedly hosted the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF), the largest fintech festival in the world attracting participants from over 140 countries.
This year, for the first time since its founding, a crypto company, ShuttleOne, clinched first place under the ASEAN FinTech award category.
To many fintech observers, this development is actually not a surprise at all. Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, the fintech industry, along with other brick and mortar businesses, have seen tremendous improvements in the areas of cost-cutting, digitisation, and efficiency.
Also Read: 5 reasons why crypto exchanges need to be decentralized
The recently concluded UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) has also sparked calls for greater transparency in the way people and businesses work. This point was repeatedly hammered by Kimbal Musk, billionaire Tesla board member and brother of Elon Musk, who has set up a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) focusing on food justice.
Speaking on this issue, Musk said that one of the goals of this charity is to revolutionise the philanthropy industry using blockchain, a move that he believes will remove inefficiencies and increase public trust in charitable organisations.
Such ideas are no longer radical. Today, e-governance leaders such as Estonia advocate for the use of blockchain to provide secure services to citizens. Thailand has also laid out future plans to attract “crypto tourists” to uplift the tourism sector.
In Singapore, despite the lack of “flashy” announcements, local government-linked organisations have been secretly working behind the scenes with crypto companies to improve their offerings.
For example, at the beginning of this year, we saw how ShuttleOne helped finance the first batch of electric vehicles to replace the entire taxi fleet for commercial use in Singapore by 2026 — an early indication of Singapore’s careful but eager adoption of decentralised finance to fund public projects.
The ever-changing nature of the global fintech ecosystem spells massive opportunities for the relatively nascent universe of blockchain.
As the world gradually warms up to the idea of decentralised finance, Singapore must continuously stay ahead or risk being left behind in this global race into the cryptoverse and beyond.
It is not wrong to say that fortune favours the brave. But we forget that fortune also favours those who can see things for what they are truly worth.
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