Lim said he aims to grow the depth of the exchange to make it a better marketplace for trading. — The Straits Times
SINGAPORE: The digital-asset exchange of Singapore’s largest listed bank is looking to attract more investors by beefing up what it offers, including a stablecoin listing and yield-earning or staking services to its fold.
DBS Digital Exchange (DDEx) chief executive Lim Wee Kian, 56, told The Straits Times in his first media interview since he started in November 2023 that the plans, based on customer demands, are still in their infancy.
“We are closely studying one of the largest stablecoins by market capitalisation from an issuer that is licenced in several jurisdictions. We will be guided by our clients’ requirements, market trends and regulatory considerations when it comes to listing stablecoins on DDEx,” he said.
Stablecoins are tokens that are usually pegged to major currencies like the US dollar, or to commodities, on a one-to-one basis.
The top three stablecoins by market capitalisation are Tether or USDT, USD Coin or USDC issued by global payments firm Circle, and Dai that is issued by Ethereum-based protocol MakerDAO, based on CoinMarketCap.com data.
USDT has a market cap of US$112.4bil, while USDC is at US$38.2bil and Dai at US$5.3bil.
Circle’s Singapore entity was in June 2023 granted a full licence by Singapore’s regulator to offer digital-asset services here.
Currently, DDEx offers accredited and institutional investors six cryptocurrencies and tokens to trade in. They include the two biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap – Bitcoin and Ether (ETH).
As part of product expansion, the exchange is now studying how it can provide staking to clients.
Staking works by letting users generate yields in return for allowing their tokens to be used to facilitate transactions on a blockchain.
Said Lim: “Professional investors not only want capital gains from the coins that they actually bought, but also want to get rewards from the coins that they’re holding, so we’re actually studying providing ETH staking as a service to our clients.”
He said he aims to grow the depth of the exchange to make it a better marketplace for trading.
This could be done by getting more market makers to put in bids and offers, while encouraging clients to put in more orders to trade.
To attract these people, there must be tight spreads, where the difference between the asking price and the bidding price is low, said Lim.
The team is also working on is a request-for-quote (RFQ) model for the exchange that would make it more attractive for investors who do large trades.
The RFQ method is used by traders to obtain price quotes from multiple liquidity providers for a large trade, a process common in block trading or over-the-counter markets. — The Straits Times/ANN
