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Short abstract:

Singapore’s central bank is developing infrastructural capacities for a future where digital currencies are mainstream. While its aim is to protect money as a public good, the project is steered by fintech industry stakeholders who frame “the public” as a market for digital monies as a service.

Long abstract:

Bracing for a global shift to blockchain-based currencies, Singapore’s central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), is developing regulatory frameworks for “digital payment tokens” – commonly known as cryptocurrencies – and experimenting with the issuance of digital Singapore dollars. While these initiatives explicitly aim to protect money as a public good, and are conducted in an open and consultative manner, the interlocutors MAS engages and collaborates with are commercial and retail banks, digital platform companies including crypto-trading platforms, digital payment companies, and fintech startups – all private industry stakeholders. The high level of technical knowledge and expertise that it takes to participate in (or even understand) these debates and experiments keeps ordinary citizens out. MAS discussions of digital currencies, meanwhile, refer to the citizen as a “consumer,” “customer,” “client” and “end-user.” The future form of the national currency that all citizens must use is thus being worked out in conversations they do not have a voice in; and in which state authorities represent them, not as members of a democracy, but as paying users of a service whose interests and demands are presumed known. My analysis of how money is being remade in Singapore brings concepts from the anthropology of money into conversation with the emergent “social studies of central banking” (Coombs 2022). I examine disjunctures between the “epistemic cultures” (Knorr-Cetina, 2009) of the experts involved and the “narratives” (Holmes 2014) they perform to publics that, in their construction, are indistinguishable from markets for money as a service.