Global Layer One (GL1) is the Monetary Authority of Singapore-coordinated initiative to build a shared institutional-grade ledger infrastructure that licensed financial institutions can deploy tokenised products onto without each operating its own permissioned ledger. Phase 1 closed at the Singapore Fintech Festival in November 2025 with a 108-control GL1 Toolkit aligned with global regulatory principles, named participation from BNY, Citi, JPMorgan, MUFG, and Société Générale-FORGE, observer roles for the European Central Bank, Banque de France, and IMF, and the planned creation of a non-profit GL1 Org to govern the next phase (MAS speech "Towards Achieving Trusted, Open and Interoperable Networks", 12 Nov 2025; Fintech News Singapore coverage). For an APAC tokenisation operator, GL1 is the most ambitious institutional public-network proposition in the region, and the architectural alternative to the regulator-coordinated wholesale settlement layer model that HKMA EnsembleTX is rolling out in Hong Kong.
What GL1 actually is
GL1 is a shared-ledger proposition rather than a single physical network. The intent is for licensed financial institutions to be able to issue, transfer, and settle tokenised instruments on a network whose operating principles, control standards, and governance structure are designed up-front to satisfy the supervisory expectations of multiple jurisdictions, rather than each institution standing up bespoke permissioned infrastructure with bilateral interoperability bridges. The contrast with bilateral patterns (the DBS-Kinexys interoperability framework, Partior's consortium-ledger model, the EnsembleTX wholesale settlement model) is structural: GL1 is positioned as a shared substrate, not as a bridge between separately-operated rails or as a regulator-operated wholesale leg.
Phase 1 of GL1 ran through 2024-2025 and produced the Toolkit, the participant set, and the proof-of-concept work that anchored the November 2025 set-piece announcement. Phase 2 is scoped around three workstreams (fixed income, foreign exchange, asset and wealth management) with standardised protocols and data specifications, and around the establishment of GL1 Org as the non-profit governance entity (Fintech News Singapore). The MAS framing is that Phase 1 was a coordinated industry experiment under MAS leadership, and Phase 2 transitions GL1 toward an industry-led governance posture with MAS as one of the supervisory anchors rather than the operational lead.
The 108-control Toolkit
The headline deliverable from Phase 1 is the GL1 Toolkit, a published set of 108 controls aligned with global regulatory principles that provide an operational reference for designing a shared-ledger network that satisfies institutional supervisory expectations. The Toolkit is the load-bearing artefact for operators considering whether to build to GL1 specification, because it converts the abstract "institutional-grade public network" proposition into a concrete control checklist covering identity, authorisation, transaction-level controls, custody arrangements, recoverability, governance, and supervisory-access surfaces.
What the Toolkit does is collapse the N-by-N negotiation problem that tokenised-asset operators face when trying to satisfy multiple supervisors with different control expectations. If a bank's tokenisation rail is built to the GL1 Toolkit specification, the regulatory dialogue with each new jurisdiction's supervisor starts with the supervisor's controls already mapped against a published reference, rather than the bank having to derive the mapping from scratch. The Toolkit does not, by itself, constitute regulatory approval anywhere; it is the operational reference, not a licensing route. But the supervisors involved as observers (ECB, BdF, IMF) and the MAS-led publication signal an intent to use the Toolkit as the design vocabulary for cross-jurisdictional supervisory conversations on shared institutional ledgers.
The Toolkit specifics (the per-control text, the cross-mapping to specific supervisory frameworks like Basel principles or CPMI-IOSCO PFMI standards) were not published in summary form in the trade-press coverage of the November 2025 launch. Operators integrating GL1-eligible flows should treat the per-control mapping as a per-jurisdiction integration question against the published Toolkit text rather than assert a single GL1-equals-globally-acceptable shape (MAS speech).
The participant set
The Phase 1 participant set is a deliberate cross-section of GSIB tokenisation programmes plus EU and Asian institutional anchors. The named financial-institution participants are BNY, Citi, JPMorgan, MUFG, and Société Générale-FORGE, with industry-association participation from GFMA, ICMA, and ISDA. The observer roles are held by the European Central Bank, Banque de France, and the IMF. Additional named participants include S&P Global Ratings, Alta Exchange, Hamilton Lane, and Phillip Securities (Fintech News Singapore).
The institutional-adoption signal is operationally distinctive. The participant set is heavier on US GSIBs (BNY, Citi, JPMorgan) than the broader Singapore Project Guardian roster, which has historically been Asia-bank-heavy. The presence of Société Générale-FORGE brings an EU-licensed digital-asset issuance subsidiary into the participant set, and the ECB and BdF observer roles indicate Eurosystem supervisory attention without committing the EU to a positioned stance on GL1's architecture. The IMF observer role is a multilateral signal more than an operational one. What is not on the published participant list is as readable as what is on it: HSBC, Standard Chartered, the Japanese megabanks beyond MUFG, and the Korean banks are absent from the named Phase 1 set, which leaves them as second-wave opportunities rather than founding institutional anchors.
How GL1 sits next to Project Guardian
GL1 is not Project Guardian. The two are MAS-coordinated and overlap in participant set, but they answer different architectural questions. Project Guardian is an industry pilot programme structured around named workstreams (asset and wealth management, fixed income, foreign exchange, trade finance) where named institutions run pilots on their own infrastructure under their existing licences. GL1 is a shared-ledger infrastructure proposition: a network specification rather than a workstream programme. A pilot inside Project Guardian could plausibly settle on GL1-compliant infrastructure, but Guardian itself does not require that and the participating banks have historically run Guardian pilots on their own permissioned ledgers.
The clean way to read the relationship is that Project Guardian produced the architectural patterns (purpose-bound money, trust anchors, interoperability protocols) that informed how a shared institutional ledger should be designed, and GL1 is the operational expression of that lineage at the network-infrastructure layer. Whether Phase 2 of GL1 ends up being the substrate that Guardian pilots default to, or remains an alternative substrate that participants choose between, is the live architectural question for 2026.
Cross-jurisdiction implications
GL1 matters beyond Singapore on three vectors. First, it gives MAS a credible architectural answer to the question "what is the APAC institutional-tokenisation default network" that does not rely on either US-bank-led infrastructure (Kinexys) or HKMA-coordinated wholesale settlement (EnsembleTX). The competitive frame against EnsembleTX is structural: HKMA's model is regulator-operated wholesale settlement under bank-issued tokenised-deposit and tokenised-asset layers above; GL1's model is shared institutional infrastructure that participants build on directly. Both are valid and they could plausibly co-exist with bilateral interoperability bridges between them.
Second, the planned GL1 Org governance vehicle is the structural piece worth tracking. If GL1 Org becomes a multilateral non-profit with EU and Asian central-bank observer roles continuing into Phase 2, it is one of the few institutional-network governance entities in the world that has cross-jurisdictional supervisor representation built into the structure. That positions GL1 to be the venue where shared-ledger control standards are negotiated across jurisdictions, rather than each jurisdiction requiring bilateral mapping.
Third, the 108-control Toolkit's adoption by participants outside the named Phase 1 set is the leading indicator for whether GL1 becomes the de facto APAC institutional default or remains one option among several. As of the November 2025 announcement, the GL1 Toolkit is the most fully-specified institutional shared-ledger design reference published by any APAC regulator, but the Hong Kong, Japanese, and Korean institutions running their own consortium ledgers (Ensemble, Progmat, the Korean won-stablecoin consortium) have not committed to building to GL1 specification.
Open questions
- The full text of the 108 controls and the specific cross-mapping to Basel, CPMI-IOSCO, and per-jurisdiction supervisory frameworks. The November 2025 announcement summarised the Toolkit's existence and the 108-control count; the per-control text and the mapping table are not yet in summary trade-press coverage.
- The legal form, founding-board composition, jurisdiction of incorporation, and operating model for GL1 Org as a non-profit. The MAS framing is that GL1 Org is "planned"; the operational structure has not been published.
- Whether the second-wave participant additions in Phase 2 include HSBC, Standard Chartered, Japanese megabanks beyond MUFG, or Korean institutional anchors, and on what timeline.
- The settlement-asset choice for cash-leg transactions on GL1. Whether participating banks settle tokenised-asset transactions in tokenised commercial-bank deposits (their own or counterparties'), regulated stablecoins under the MAS SCS framework or comparable foreign frameworks, or via off-ledger payment instructions has not been settled in public coverage.
- The interoperability posture between GL1 and other institutional rails (Partior, Kinexys BDA, EnsembleTX wholesale settlement). The published GL1 framing is shared substrate rather than bridge, but the integration with existing GSIB-operated tokenised-deposit infrastructure is unresolved.
- Whether agentic commerce (AI-agent-controlled wallets as eligible holders or transactors on GL1-compliant networks) is in scope for Phase 2 design work or deferred to a later phase. The 108-control Toolkit and the participant set are institutionally permissioned at launch; the agentic-commerce surface is not addressed.