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Gemini is now a fully licensed Major Payment Institution in Singapore, and the part that changes the business is the fine print: the MAS license removes the standard activity caps, S$3 million per payment service and S$6 million combined, that smaller licensees operate under. Gemini Digital Payments Singapore received the full MPI grant under the Payment Services Act on Sept. 9, covering Digital Payment Token services and Cross-Border Money Transfer without volume ceilings. After roughly two years in the queue, following its October 2024 in-principle approval and an April 2025 customer migration, Gemini now holds the same regulatory tier that expanding exchanges treat as a launch permit.
The tier matters because of what it lets an exchange do quietly. Under the caps, a Singapore operation is a boutique; above them, it is infrastructure. Full MPI status lets Gemini scale institutional prime brokerage, custody, and cross-border payment flows through Singapore across Southeast Asia without re-applying as volumes grow, inside a jurisdiction that has become the APAC regulatory benchmark precisely because its rulebook is strict and stable. Gemini has operated in Singapore since 2020, and the Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss statements land on the same theme: Cameron called the approval validation of the firm's long-term regulatory investment in Singapore as an institutional gateway, while Tyler framed the city as a primary strategic hub for serving APAC retail and institutional flow under a transparent framework.
"We're pleased to announce that Gemini Digital Payments Singapore, Pte. Ltd. (GDPSPL) has received a Major Payment Institution licence from @MAS_sg, allowing us to provide Digital Payment Token and Cross-Border Money Transfer services." — Gemini, on X
Singapore Is Where the Institutional Map Gets Drawn
Zoom out and the MPI cohort is the actual APAC league table: Coinbase, Crypto.com, OKX, Bitstamp, and Cumberland hold the license, and Gemini just joined. Being on that list is less about Singapore's domestic market than about the regulatory signaling to the rest of the region, where fund managers and family offices in Jakarta, Bangkok, and Hong Kong route compliance decisions through which venues hold which licenses. It is the same institutional-gateway logic driving regional champions like OrionX raising to expand licensed footprints in their own markets, and the same reason Singapore keeps winning licenses that Circle is paying $400 million to acquire MAS-adjacent payment infrastructure.
The skepticism, briefly, because licenses are not revenue. MAS compliance carries real ongoing costs, technology risk management mandates, AML surveillance, and reporting obligations that scale with headcount and volume. Gemini's Singapore pivot also lands while the exchange faces sharper competition from the incumbents already operating at full MPI scale, and a license without differentiated product is a toll booth on a road other venues paved. The Winklevoss framing of "institutional gateway" only pays off if Gemini converts the license into prime services that the Crypto.com and Coinbase Singapore desks have been selling for years.
What to watch: hiring in Singapore over the next two quarters and the first product announcements built on the cross-border money transfer permission. The license is the permit. The build-out is the bet.