November 12–14, 2025 · Singapore EXPO
There were no Lamborghinis in the car park. That, more than any keynote, is how you measure the distance crypto has travelled. The Singapore FinTech Festival is where the people who actually run the money system gather — central bankers, the heads of the world’s largest asset managers, regulators with real power — and in 2025 they spent three days earnestly discussing the very things the crypto crowd had been shouting about for years. Only now it was in quieter voices, and considerably better suits.
I have a weakness for that particular moment: the one where a wild idea stops being a rebellion and starts being an agenda item. So the world’s largest fintech gathering — over 70,000 people from 142 countries, some 300 sessions, and 900-odd speakers, all under one enormous roof and run by Singapore’s own central bank — was exactly the room I wanted a read on. Fittingly, it was the festival’s tenth birthday: a decade-old party for an industry that has finally visibly grown up.
Where the grown-ups gather
The old line between “fintech” and “crypto” has worn so thin it’s barely worth drawing any more, and SFF 2025 didn’t bother. Digital assets weren’t cordoned off in a rebellious corner; they ran straight through the middle of the programme, sitting comfortably beside payments, banking and AI as though they’d always belonged. The official theme — a “blueprint for the next decade of finance” — leaned on a three-part tech stack: artificial intelligence, tokenisation, and, for the properly forward-looking, quantum computing. When the people whose day job is not losing the financial system’s money start planning a decade around your once-fringe technology, something has shifted.
What they were actually building
The substance was all about turning real things into digital ones. Tokenisation — the unglamorous work of representing bonds, shares and funds as tokens that can move instantly and around the clock — was the star, and the clearest evidence on offer was money market funds: when giants like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are tokenising their own funds, you’re no longer looking at an experiment. You’re looking at a plumbing upgrade. Alongside it sat embedded finance (blockchain quietly disappearing into everyday banking, which is rather the point), and the thornier subject of central bank digital currencies — where, whatever you make of the privacy debates they raise, several Asian central banks are further down the road toward real retail pilots than most Western commentators seem to notice. And throughout, AI and blockchain were discussed not as two rival buzzwords but as one combined stack — the machinery, people kept saying, for the next generation of finance.
Crossing the chasm
Here’s the frame I find genuinely clarifying. The business writer Geoffrey Moore wrote a book called Crossing the Chasm about the terrifying gap every new technology has to leap: the one between the visionaries who adopt a thing because they believe, and the vast, sceptical, pragmatic mainstream who adopt it only once it plainly works and everyone sensible is already using it. Most technologies die in that chasm, unloved and unbought. What SFF 2025 showed — with its central bankers and its trillion-dollar asset managers treating tokenisation as an operational question rather than a philosophical one — is an industry that has, at last, leapt. The institutions have arrived not as curious tourists but as permanent residents. That’s the whole story, really.
The year, in one line
Step back from this one festival, and the year’s bigger arc comes into focus. The speculation-driven cycles of crypto’s adolescence gave way in 2025 to something sturdier and, frankly, duller: infrastructure built in public, regulation debated rather than dodged, and a community that quietly graduated from believers into builders. The same themes echoed at every serious gathering — tokenised real-world assets, DeFi maturing from experiment into plumbing, AI and blockchain converging, and institutional money settling in for the long haul. The mood travelled a matching distance: from the cautious optimism of January to a grounded, unshowy confidence by December. Not the euphoric certainty of a market top. Something more useful — the calm of an industry that has stopped asking whether it’s real and started asking what to build next.
How I read it
I’ll be honest, this is my favourite kind of story: the unglamorous middle of a revolution, where the fireworks are long over, and the actual work gets done. It’s less thrilling than the moonshot phase, and infinitely more trustworthy. None of it tells you what any price does next week, and the timeline for all this “next decade” talk remains gloriously vague — these things always take longer than the optimists promise. But there’s a deep, quiet reassurance in watching serious people build carefully in plain sight, and it rewards exactly the habit of thinking in years rather than weeks that I try to bring to everything. I watch these rooms, note the change in the weather, and go on making my own decisions at my own unhurried pace.
This is me thinking out loud in your company — a read on the mood, not financial advice. What you do with a maturing industry is entirely your call.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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