Bursa once said no to crypto. LIDAC26 showed how far Malaysia has come since

 Luno's institutional digital asset conference packed regulators, bankers and builders into one well-run day. The question is no longer ‘if’, but ‘how fast’.

Back in 2024, I wrote a column lamenting Bursa Malaysia’s decision to keep bitcoin and other crypto assets off its new multi-asset exchange, asking whether it might go down as Bursa’s biggest blunder.

Two Thursday’s ago, I spent the better part of a day at M Resort & Hotel in Kuala Lumpur listening to regulators, bankers and fund managers talk about digital assets not as a fringe curiosity, but as the plumbing for the next generation of our capital market. What a difference two years makes.

The event was LIDAC26, the Luno Institutional Digital Asset Conference, now in its second edition. Luno, one of the digital asset exchanges registered with the Securities Commission Malaysia (SC), pitched it squarely at institutions rather than retail punters, and the room reflected that.

The main hall kept the headline sessions flowing from 9.30am, four breakout sessions ran in smaller rooms alongside it through the day, and the session screens I saw all carried a QR code for live audience questions.

Attendees could even earn seven continuing professional development (CPD) points, the credits licensed finance professionals collect to keep their qualifications current, which tells you exactly who the organisers were courting.

So what were the big takeaways? Three stood out.

1. Stablecoins are the real story

Luno chief executive James Lanigan opened proceedings with a slide that cut through a lot of the noise. By Luno’s count, about RM1.43 trillion worth of assets had been tokenised, or recorded as digital tokens on a blockchain, by the first quarter of 2026, and roughly RM1.26 trillion of that was stablecoins, tokens pegged to a currency such as the US dollar.

That’s right. Around 90% of all tokenised assets are, in effect, digital cash, the overwhelming majority of which is tokenised USD, cementing it as not only the world’s reserve currency but the currency of choice in the budding crypto economy.

Lanigan’s framing was that the industry had moved from speculation, through building infrastructure, and was now firmly in its institutional era, with one of his final slides declaring that Malaysia was not a late market, but an early one.

2. The regulator wants substance, not buzzwords

The most anticipated session was that by Wong Huei Ching, the SC’s executive director of digital strategy and innovation, who laid out where Malaysia’s rules are heading.

Her message, stripped to its core, was that putting an asset on a blockchain is not innovation in itself, and that pilots need to prove their worth before the rules are rewritten.

The SC is practising what it preaches. In April, it teamed up with Khazanah Nasional, our sovereign wealth fund, to price Malaysia’s first tokenised sukuk (an Islamic bond recorded on a blockchain), a RM100 million pilot that SC chairman Mohammad Faiz Azmi said would test tokenisation’s potential “in a controlled and credible manner”.

The market she regulates is growing fast, too. Trading value on Malaysia’s licensed digital asset exchanges hit RM17.14 billion in 2025, a 23% jump from RM13.93 billion the year before, according to the SC.

3. The ringgit is going on-chain

John Ho, head of legal and financial markets at Standard Chartered, walked participants in the main hall through Bank Negara Malaysia’s growing list of experiments. These include Project Mawar, which explores a wholesale digital ringgit for banks, and the central bank’s Digital Asset Innovation Hub, where Standard Chartered and Capital A are testing a ringgit stablecoin, while Maybank trials tokenised deposits.

The prize is not small. One industry estimate cited on stage, and widely reported, puts Malaysia’s tokenisation opportunity at around RM175 billion by 2030.

The tidbits

Many other speakers added flair and colour to the proceedings. Former deputy international trade and industry minister Ong Kian Ming spoke on navigating digital assets in a fragmenting global order, while Harjit Singh of HSS Advisory and Anil Puri of EY tackled a question plenty of Malaysian crypto investors have been asking for years: how exactly will all this be taxed?

My favourite, though, was a breakout billed as Malaysian builders shaping the global digital asset landscape. On one stage sat TM Lee, co-founder of CoinGecko, Matthew Tan, founder of Etherscan, and Siong Ong, co-founder of Jupiter, products used by crypto traders the world over.

CoinGecko and Etherscan were both born right here in Kuala Lumpur, and I can’t help but feel proud that some of the most widely used tools in the industry were built by Malaysians.

Siong Ong’s speaker photo on the big screen? A Pudgy Penguin, an uber popular non-fungible token (NFT) collection. In a day full of suits, it was a welcome reminder of where this industry came from.

The one glaring miss

I was, however, surprised that bitcoin, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, barely got a look-in. Bitcoin alone is worth around RM6.9 trillion today, according to CoinGecko, and together with ether, the Ethereum network’s native token, the pair make up about two-thirds of the entire crypto market.

Stablecoins, for all the stage time they got, account for a mere 10%. Despite more than a decade of relentless innovation in the industry, bitcoin still commands over half of all crypto value, and not telling that story was a missed opportunity.

So where does that leave us? The SC revised its guidelines on Mar 2 to permit digital currency exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and Bursa, the very exchange that shut crypto out of its multi-asset platform in 2024, said in March that it welcomed the listing of digital currency ETFs, and told reporters in July that it planned to add them to its line-up.

The regulator has built the framework, Khazanah has shown the plumbing can work and Bank Negara is already testing the ringgit on-chain. All that’s left is for the first digital currency ETF to actually start trading on Bursa. After all, it’s about time the exchange that once said no had something to show for its yes. - FMT

The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.