Singapore Announces $150 Million Fund For Web3 and New Tech

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is to invest $150 million over the next three years in web3 startups and other technologies, MAS said in a statement.

“MAS recognises the importance of partnering with the industry to support innovative FinTech solutions arising from emerging technologies such as Web 3.0,” it said before adding:

“MAS will conduct open calls for the use of innovative technologies in industry use cases. Grant funding will be provided to support actual trial and commercialisation.”

This is the first time a government entity invests in crypto innovation, with Ravi Menon, the Managing Director at MAS, stating:

“We look forward to continued collaboration with the industry to advance purposeful financial innovation.”

The investment will be under the renewed Financial Sector Technology and Innovation Scheme (FSTI 3.0) which has been running since 2015 but includes Web3 for the first time.

It aims to “accelerate and strengthen innovation by supporting projects that involve the use of cutting-edge technologies.”

Web3 is an umbrella term used to describe the new wave of innovation that integrates blockchain tech in apps and websites to decentralize the web.

It is a fairly new term, with one of its promise being the ownership of data. Currently, the Tweets you tweet or who you follow are owned by Twitter.

When there was an attempt to migrate away from it, people found it difficult as you can not import your data. You have to start from scratch while losing all the Twitter history or the connections (follows) built up over the years.

That migratory attempt thus failed, giving Twitter a monopoly of sorts. Likewise for Reddit, which was able to withstand a user backlash due to exorbitant fees for API access because the users can not just take the data and leave, they have to start from scratch.