The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has announced its collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The collaboration will provide an opportunity to Singapore-based industry professionals and researchers to work with MIT researchers. It will also enable financial institutions and fintech players to participate in pilots and experiments in a wide range of financial-services projects.

The MAS said that the country’s financial industry is actively involved in experimentation on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and has developed prototypes on interbank payments, securities settlement, insurance claims processing, trade, and trade finance.

“We are pleased to be working with leading experts with a diverse range of expertise from the MIT Media Lab. The intersection of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and other related technology areas such as quantum computing and new methods of cryptography will help to bring about the next wave of innovation,” Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief FinTech Officer, MAS, said.

The MAS said that the collaboration with MIT signals the growing role that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are beginning to play in the financial industry.

“Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology pose a dramatic change to the existing regulatory landscape; they have the potential to reform the global financial system around peer-to-peer transactions, without traditional financial intermediation,” Neha Narula, Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, said. “We are excited to work with an organization like the MAS which shares our thinking around the impact of open-source, layered architectures and permissionless system