10/03/2026
Last week at the , we attended the GL1 Round Table and walked away with a lot to think about.
Naoto Shimoda, General Manager of Digital Strategy at SMFG/SMBC, shared a perspective on GL1 that I found both compelling and refreshingly honest.
GL1, or Global Layer One, is the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)-led initiative to build shared DLT infrastructure for cross-border tokenized asset transactions.
Today, capital markets are at an early but pivotal moment in the adoption of digital assets, and the infrastructure question is finally forcing itself to the top of the agenda.
Naoto laid out what a new infrastructure could unlock:
→ 24/7 DLT infrastructure that eliminates the friction of legacy cross-border settlement
→ Programmable settlements enabling real intra-day yield opportunities that simply don't exist today
→ Wholesale CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) finally having a foundation built to match their potential
But he didn't shy away from the hard questions either.
Regulatory, legal, tax, and accounting frameworks remain inconsistent across jurisdictions. Commercial viability is still unproven.
Working through them without papering them over is the key to progress.
However, what genuinely excited me was his bullish outlook: in 3 to 5 years, chain abstraction may make the underlying technology largely invisible.
Whether an asset sits on one chain or another, or is even classified as digital, may stop being a question anyone needs to ask.
That's the inflection point where this stops being a fintech narrative and simply becomes... infrastructure. 🧩
Grateful to fellow speakers Chyi Yan Hshieh, Danielle Szetho, David Katz, Fernando Luis Vázquez Cao, Isadora Arredondo, Ivan Mortimer-Schutts, Kelvin Tan, Masashi Watanabe, Mayumi Ojima, Ryosuke Ushida, and Sandra Ro 🇺🇦 for a rich and wide-ranging discussion, and to moderator Alan Lim for keeping it sharp.
And of course, to GFTN for curating conversations at this level. 🌏
