I also want to give a very warm welcome to Stéphane Latouche. Building on his wide raging  1/4  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  experience within and outside the Bank, he will I am sure contribute to develop further the activities of our rep office with all of you, and notably deepen our bilateral ties with the MAS, notably for future innovation partnerships. As a matter of fact, innovation never stops, innovation is above all change. Financial innovation illustrates this time of rapid change, with a wave of new players, new digital assets in the form of crypto-assets, as well as new exchange and settlement infrastructures. Among those digitalisation trends, so-called "decentralised finance", DeFi, is emerging. DeFi is a set of applications offering financial services based on crypto-assets, operating on public blockchains and using smart contracts. We need as supervisors and providers of settlement services in central bank money to stay alert, explore its opportunities and address challenges it raises. II. Impact on BdF activities and stability mandate To that end we have been developing our actions along two axes that should serve as an additional basis for the dialogue and cooperation we have been developing from here in Singapour. 1.The first axis is to move beyond the first generation of crypto-asset regulation Indeed, the first generation of crypto-asset regulations does not fully address the challenges posed by DeFi. For example, in Europe, fully "decentralised" services are excluded from the scope of the MiCA regulation.
To contribute to the reflection, we are about to publish a discussion paper on the possible regulatory options for DeFi. In order to build the most appropriate framework, taking notably into account the question of proportionality, we need to feed our thinking with input from all stakeholders: financial services or crypto-assets industry professionals, IT specialists, academics, other regulators and supervisors- That is why this document will be open to a wide consultation and I look forward to listening to your reactions on it. 2. The second axis is to use DeFi innovation to serve the possible development of tokenised finance and to improve cross-border payments Our monitoring of DeFi is not just motivated by financial stability risk but also by our intuition that its innovative potential could serve the development of an ongoing trend: the tokenisation of finance. To do so, central banks and the traditional financial players need to understand how DeFi operates and master its innovative aspects in order to use them in a secure way to do something else than speculate on crypto-assets. This is what we are trying do with the project Mariana, our ongoing experiment with the MAS, the Swiss National Bank and the Eurosystem, Singapore and Switzerland BIS Innovation Hub Centres. Basically, we are building an automated market for the exchange of CBDCs based on a concept imported from DeFi. This project is really at the crossroads of a number of topics: enhancing cross-border payments, CBDCs interoperability, understanding of DeFi and the development of tokenised finance.