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The Monetary Authority of Singapore announced a package of measures on August 19 meant to keep Singapore competitive as an asset management hub, an industry MAS says has grown 7.5% a year over the past five years to almost S$7 trillion under management and now accounts for roughly 15% of the financial sector's output.
The package has three parts: a tax exemption on profit-related returns earned by fund managers from qualifying funds, a new MAS Hedge Fund Investment Programme under which the regulator will co-invest with managers who anchor their business in Singapore, and a new Investment Management Track under the ONE Pass visa framework aimed at senior investment professionals.
Nothing in the release mentions crypto, digital assets, or tokenization. Read on its own, it looks like a straightforward pitch to conventional hedge funds and private equity shops. It is worth reading anyway, because the mechanism MAS is using already runs through Singapore's digital-asset fund industry, whether or not the regulator felt the need to say so.
The tax exemption applies to "qualifying funds," a term of art in Singapore that refers to funds structured under Sections 13D, 13O, 13OA, 13U and 13V of the Income Tax Act. Those are the same schemes that Singapore's digital-asset and crypto funds already use to get their income tax-exempt: fund managers routinely structure crypto vehicles as Variable Capital Companies to qualify under 13O or 13U, holding tokens with regulated custodians and appointing a MAS-licensed manager so that the fund's gains fall within the schemes' definition of designated investments. Whether a specific digital asset counts as a designated investment is, by the industry's own account, fact-specific and confirmed case by case with tax advisers, but the underlying wrapper is the same one MAS just built new incentives on top of.
What's actually new is that the exemption reaches personal income, not just fund-level returns. MAS and the Ministry of Finance plan to exempt profit-related returns that fund managers and investment professionals receive directly for managing a qualifying fund, effective from the Year of Assessment 2027, with full details due at Budget 2027. That distinction matters more for crypto managers than for a typical long-only equity shop, because digital-asset fund compensation tends to be far more carry-weighted relative to fixed salary. A performance-driven pay structure that previously sat awkwardly against Singapore's income tax treatment of individuals is now, in principle, covered the same way it is for a traditional hedge fund manager.
The ONE Pass change points at the same friction. MAS said the new Investment Management Track may refine how salaries are assessed for visa eligibility to recognize "returns linked to investment performance and fund outcomes" rather than only fixed monthly pay. Global crypto fund managers, whose compensation is often mostly carry, have historically had a harder time clearing high fixed-salary thresholds used in talent visa programs elsewhere. If Singapore's revised assessment genuinely counts performance-linked income, it removes a real obstacle to relocating digital-asset investment talent into the country, not just conventional portfolio managers.
The MAS Hedge Fund Investment Programme is the least defined of the three measures and the one to watch. MAS says it will invest directly alongside hedge fund managers who commit to building out a Singapore presence, with more detail to come. Nothing in the announcement excludes digital-asset strategies from that anchor capital, and a crypto-native fund with genuine Singapore substance, licensed management, and institutional custody would appear to meet the same bar MAS is describing for any other manager it might back.
The reason to read Singapore's silence on crypto as strategic rather than incidental is Hong Kong. Hong Kong's own overhaul of its carried interest and fund tax exemption regime, introduced this year, explicitly widens the asset classes eligible for its 0% carried interest concession to include digital assets alongside private credit and carbon credits, and extends that concession down to individual professionals' personal salaries, retrospective to the 2025-26 assessment year. Hong Kong wrote crypto into its statute. Singapore's package, announced the same week and described by Bloomberg as a direct response to Hong Kong's move, achieves something similar in substance for digital-asset managers but does it by extending an existing, asset-neutral scheme rather than naming the asset class at all.
For a fund manager weighing where to domicile a digital-asset strategy, that difference is not cosmetic. Hong Kong now offers legislative certainty that crypto income qualifies for its personal carry tax break. Singapore offers a larger, more established asset management ecosystem, a broader talent visa concession, and a new pool of anchor capital, but leaves the question of whether a given token or strategy counts as a designated investment to case-by-case confirmation with tax counsel, exactly as it always has. Budget 2027 is where that ambiguity either gets resolved or gets left in place, and it is the detail crypto fund managers in Singapore have the most reason to watch closely, more than anything in this week's headline announcement.
