Central Bank of Malaysia releases three-year roadmap to pilot asset tokenization projects.

On November 1st, the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia, BNM) announced a three-year roadmap, planning to pilot asset tokenization projects within the financial system. The plan will kick off multiple proof-of-concept (POC) and actual pilot projects through the Digital Asset Innovation Hub (DAIH) established earlier this year. The core content of the roadmap includes the establishment of an Asset Tokenization Industry Working Group (IWG), jointly led by the central bank and the Securities Commission (SC), responsible for promoting industry exploration, knowledge sharing, and regulatory coordination. The initial pilots will focus on application scenarios with clear economic value, such as supply chain financing to expand access to credit for small and medium enterprises, tokenized liquidity management to enhance settlement efficiency, and compliant applications for automatically executing Islamic finance transactions. BNM also plans to study tokenized deposit and stablecoin solutions priced in Ringgit to ensure currency consistency and improve digital settlement efficiency, as well as explore integration with wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDC). The project aims to modernize financial infrastructure in sync with Asian regulatory agencies such as the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA).