Last updated 6 September 2026 — by Adrian Tan, SDM. Marketing guidance, not legal or financial advice. Any DPT service provider should take its own regulatory advice before publishing anything.
There is one industry in Singapore whose regulator has told it, in writing, not to advertise.
Not “advertise carefully”. Not “add a risk warning”. The MAS Guidelines on Provision of Digital Payment Token Services to the Public (PS-G02), issued on 17 January 2022, say that digital payment token service providers “should not promote their DPT services in public areas in Singapore or through any other media directed at the general public in Singapore” — and then list the channels: public transport, public transport venues, broadcast media, periodical publications, third party websites, social media platforms, public events and roadshows.
If you have wondered why crypto advertising vanished from MRT stations in 2022 and never came back, that is the paragraph. And if you work on growth for a Singapore crypto, Web3 or digital-asset business, this article is about what is actually left — because the honest answer is four surfaces, and everything about how you grow follows from that.
It is also worth reading if you do not work in crypto at all. This is the clearest natural experiment anywhere in Singapore marketing of what happens to a company when paid distribution is removed entirely, and the answer generalises further than most marketers expect.
Who these Guidelines bind
Paragraph 1.5 sets the perimeter. Unless stated otherwise, the Guidelines apply to DPT service providers licensed under the Payment Services Act, banks and all other financial institutions providing DPT services in Singapore, and to providers operating under the transitional exemption — entities that were providing DPT services before the PS Act commenced, notified MAS, and are allowed to continue while their licence application is reviewed.
The rationale is stated just as plainly. Paragraph 1.1 records that MAS “has consistently warned the public that the trading of cryptocurrencies is highly risky and not suitable for the general public”, and that “the public should not be encouraged to engage in the trading of DPTs”. Paragraph 1.2 notes that DPT service providers are regulated primarily for money laundering, terrorism financing and technology risk — and that customers “are otherwise not subject to any statutory protection for their trading of DPTs”.
That last clause is the key to the whole instrument. The restriction is not a punishment for the sector; it is the logical consequence of regulating the intermediary without protecting the consumer. If the customer has no statutory protection, MAS’s remaining lever is to stop the customer being recruited at scale.
What closes: the channel list, one by one
Paragraph 2.1 has two limbs. The first is about tone — providers “should not portray the trading of DPTs in a manner that trivialises the high risks”. The second is the structural one, and it names the channels. Set against a normal Singapore growth plan, here is what survives.
| Channel | Status under PS-G02 | Where it says so |
|---|---|---|
| MRT, bus, taxi and station advertising | Closed | 2.1 — “Singapore public transport, public transport venues” |
| TV, radio, cinema | Closed | 2.1 — “broadcast media” |
| Newspapers and magazines | Closed | 2.1 and footnote 3 — “periodical publications… includes any newspaper and magazine” |
| Display, programmatic, sponsored articles, comparison and review sites | Closed | 2.1 — “third party websites” |
| Paid social: boosted posts, in-feed ads, pop-ups | Closed | 2.1 and footnote 4 — “there should not be promotional banners or pop-ad advertisements on social media platforms to general public or specific consumer segment in Singapore” |
| Conferences, roadshows, activations, booths | Closed | 2.1 — “public events or roadshows” |
| Influencers, KOLs, affiliates | Closed | 2.3 — “should also not engage third parties, such as social media influencers or third-party websites” |
| Joint or co-marketing campaigns with another brand | Closed | 2.3 — “This includes joint promotional campaigns to solicit new customers” |
| Crypto ATMs in public areas | Closed | 3.1 — in-person access in public areas “is a form of promotion” |
| Your own corporate website | Open | 2.2 |
| Your own mobile application | Open | 2.2 |
| Your own official social media accounts | Open | 2.2 |
Two entries on that list deserve to be pulled out, because they are the ones that surprise people who have read only a summary.
Footnote 4 draws the line at ownership, not at message. Paragraph 2.2 permits promotion on “their own corporate website, mobile applications, or official social media accounts”. Footnote 4 prohibits “promotional banners or pop-ad advertisements on social media platforms”. The same sentence, posted on your own Instagram account, is permitted; put a budget behind it and it becomes an advertisement on a social media platform. In a Singapore crypto marketing stack, the single most consequential control is the Boost button — pressing it converts a lawful owned post into exactly the thing paragraph 2.1 addresses. Note too that footnote 4 covers advertising to “general public or specific consumer segment“, so narrowing the targeting does not help; if anything it is expressly anticipated.
Paragraph 3.1 treats a physical machine as advertising. “Providing in-person access to DPT services in public areas… is a form of promotion of DPT services to the public. Such convenient access may mislead the public to trade in DPTs on impulse.” MAS then states that providers “should not provide physical ATMs in public areas in Singapore”. That is a genuinely unusual piece of regulatory reasoning — a distribution channel reclassified as a marketing channel because of what its convenience does to the decision — and it is worth any marketer’s attention, because the same logic could be applied to other frictionless placements.
The channels you keep still carry a copy rule
Paragraph 2.2’s permission is not unconditional. Providers may promote on their own website, app and official accounts, “but must not trivialise the risks of trading in DPTs in a manner that is inconsistent with or contradicts the risk disclosures under the PS Act”. Footnote 5 identifies what those disclosures are: under Notice PSN08 on Disclosures and Communications, all licensees and exempt payment service providers offering DPT services must give all customers and potential customers a risk warning statement highlighting the risks of trading in DPTs.
Read those two together and a practical rule falls out that most crypto marketing teams do not operate under: your landing page copy is measured against your own risk disclosure, and it is measured for prospects, not just signed-up users. The phrase “potential customers” is doing the work — it pulls the top of the funnel inside the disclosure duty. A homepage that promises simplicity and effortless returns while a risk warning sits three clicks away in the onboarding flow is exactly the inconsistency paragraph 2.2 describes.
In practice that produces three concrete constraints on the pages you are still allowed to publish:
- The risk warning belongs on the acquisition surface, not only behind the signup wall, because the duty reaches potential customers.
- Conversion-rate tactics that work by removing friction cut against the instrument. Paragraph 3.1’s reasoning about ATMs — that convenient access “may mislead the public to trade in DPTs on impulse” — is a statement about frictionlessness itself, and it applies just as readily to a one-tap onboarding flow as to a machine in a mall.
- Tone is a compliance surface. “Trivialise” is a judgement about register, not about factual accuracy, so the jokey, meme-native voice that performs well for this category globally is the highest-risk element of a Singapore-facing page even when every claim in it is true.
None of that stops you writing well. It does mean the usual landing page playbook needs a second pass, and that your risk disclosure should be treated as a design input rather than a legal footnote bolted on at the end.
The derivatives trap
Section 4 of the Guidelines closes the obvious workaround. Payment token derivatives — contracts-for-differences and futures that reference DPTs — are not regulated by MAS unless offered by an Approved Exchange under the Securities and Futures Act. So a firm might reasonably ask whether it can market the derivative rather than the token.
Paragraph 4.2: providers “should not promote PTDs to the public as a convenient unregulated alternative to trading in DPTs”, and “should not mislead the public that PTDs are less risky than DPTs”. Paragraph 4.3 goes further and requires structural separation: PTD services “may only be offered through a legal entity which is not licensed under the PS Act”, except where the entity is licensed under both regimes and already subject to SFA and FAA requirements. And licensees must “take all necessary steps to ensure that its customers do not confuse any PTD services associated with the licensee as being regulated by MAS”.
For a marketing team, paragraph 4.3 is a brand-architecture instruction. It means the regulated entity and the derivatives entity cannot share a single undifferentiated brand presence, and it puts a real constraint on the “one brand, many products” approach most fintechs default to.
“They are only Guidelines” — and why that does not help
PS-G02 is issued as Guidelines, under guideline number PS-G02, and its operative sentences use “should” rather than “must”. That is a real distinction, and anyone facing a specific question should take it to counsel rather than to a blog post.
But there are two reasons the distinction gives less comfort than it appears to.
The first is visible inside the document itself. MAS did not treat every obligation in this area the same way. The risk warning statement that must be given to all customers and potential customers is imposed by Notice PSN08 on Disclosures and Communications, referenced at footnote 5 — a Notice, which is binding. The advertising restriction is a Guideline. MAS chose different instruments for the two duties, deliberately. Reading that as “the advertising restriction is optional” is a strained interpretation of a document whose paragraph 1.3 says MAS “stresses that DPT service providers should conduct themselves with the understanding that trading of DPTs is not suitable for the general public”.
The second is commercial. Your exposure as a licensee is not primarily a penalty; it is your relationship with the regulator that grants, varies and can revoke your licence. Very few firms in a licensing regime want a documented history of running campaigns their regulator has said in writing they should not run. In a licensed sector, supervisory displeasure is a more expensive currency than a fine.
The 30 June 2025 line, and who is now outside it
Anyone writing a Singapore crypto growth plan in 2026 needs one more date. On 6 June 2025 MAS issued a media release clarifying the Digital Token Service Provider (DTSP) regime under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2022, following its 30 May 2025 response to consultation.
The substance, in MAS’s own words:
- “From 30 June 2025, DTSPs providing services solely to customers outside of Singapore relating to digital payment tokens and tokens of capital market products will need to be licensed. MAS has set the bar high for licensing and will generally not issue a licence.” The stated reasons are that money laundering risks are higher in such business models, and that MAS cannot effectively supervise a person whose substantive regulated activity sits outside Singapore. Without a licence, such DTSPs “will have to cease their regulated activities”.
- Providers already serving customers in Singapore are unaffected — “there is no change to what the licensed providers can do”, and they may also serve customers outside Singapore.
- Providers of services relating to other tokens, such as those used only as utility and governance tokens, are not subject to licensing under the new regime and are not impacted.
- There is no transition period. Existing DTSPs serving only overseas customers were “required to cease this activity when the regime comes into effect on 30 June 2025”. MAS noted its position had been communicated consistently since 14 February 2022, and that it was aware of “a very small number of such providers”.
The marketing consequence is a scoping question that must be answered before any brief is written: is your entity serving Singapore customers, or only overseas ones? A Singapore-incorporated firm serving only overseas users now needs a licence MAS says it will generally not grant. A licensed provider serving Singapore customers operates normally — but inside PS-G02. Get this wrong and you will build a growth plan for a permission structure you do not have.
What actually works when paid is closed
Strip out every prohibited channel and four surfaces remain: your website, your app, your official social accounts, and whatever brings people to them. That last category is where the real work sits, and it is narrower than it first appears — because “third party websites” being closed means you cannot buy your way onto anyone else’s property. What is left is being found and being talked about.
Organic search becomes the primary acquisition channel, not a supporting one. This is the rare case where a legal constraint hands you a clean strategic answer. Search is the only scaled, repeatable way a Singapore DPT provider can reach someone who does not already know its name, without buying placement on a third party’s site. Everything that follows from that — topical authority clusters built around the questions a prospective customer actually asks, technical foundations that let a heavily-gated app product be crawled at all, and the experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust signals that a finance-adjacent site needs to rank — stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the acquisition plan.
AI answer engines matter more here than almost anywhere. If a prospective user cannot be reached by an ad and will not see an influencer post, a growing share of their research happens inside an assistant. Being the source those systems cite is the closest available substitute for the earned coverage you cannot buy, which makes visibility inside AI assistants a first-class objective rather than an experiment.
Owned social is a retention and education channel, not an acquisition one. Your official accounts are permitted, but without paid amplification their reach is bounded by the audience you already have. Plan them as a place to serve existing users and to hold the material that search and earned coverage point at — not as a source of new customers.
Earned coverage and genuine PR carry disproportionate weight, because they are the only route onto someone else’s property that a payment does not taint. The line to hold internally is the one paragraph 2.3 draws: a journalist writing about you is not you promoting through a third party; an arrangement that pays for placement is.
The product becomes the distribution. When you cannot buy reach, referral-driven and product-led growth is not a fashionable tactic but the residual option — subject to real care, because paragraph 2.3’s prohibition on engaging third parties to promote your services should shape how any incentivised referral programme is designed and how far it reaches beyond your existing users.
Notice what this list has in common. Every remaining channel compounds, and every one of them is slow. A crypto brand in Singapore cannot buy a launch; it has to accumulate one. That is a hard truth for a category whose global playbook is built on paid acquisition, and it is why the firms doing well here look less like performance marketers and more like content and search operations with a product attached — the same shape we see in other tightly regulated verticals, such as professional services.
Singapore has one regime where the constraint bites harder still, on the advertisement itself rather than on the channel or the claim: our guide to tobacco and vape advertising rules in Singapore works through the Act that treats an online buy button as the prohibited advertisement, and that attaches jurisdiction to where the campaign was built rather than to who could see it.
Frequently asked questions
Can crypto companies advertise in Singapore at all?
A DPT service provider covered by PS-G02 should not promote its DPT services in public areas in Singapore or through any media directed at the general public here — which closes public transport, broadcast, print, third-party websites, paid social, and public events. It may promote on its own corporate website, its own mobile application and its own official social media accounts, provided it does not trivialise the risks of trading in DPTs.
Can I boost a post on my own crypto company’s social account?
Paragraph 2.2 permits promotion on your own official social media accounts, while footnote 4 states there should not be promotional banners or pop-ad advertisements on social media platforms directed at the general public or a specific consumer segment in Singapore. The distinction the Guidelines draw is between an owned post and a paid placement, so boosting is the point at which an owned post becomes something the Guidelines address.
Can a crypto exchange work with influencers in Singapore?
Paragraph 2.3 says DPT service providers “should also not engage third parties, such as social media influencers or third-party websites, to promote their DPT services to the general public in Singapore”, and expressly adds that this “includes joint promotional campaigns to solicit new customers”.
Do the Guidelines apply to a firm that only serves overseas customers?
That firm has a prior problem. From 30 June 2025, a Singapore-based provider serving solely overseas customers in relation to digital payment tokens or tokens of capital market products needs a DTSP licence under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2022 — and MAS has stated it “has set the bar high for licensing and will generally not issue a licence”, with no transition period.
Are utility and governance tokens covered?
MAS’s 6 June 2025 release states that providers of services relating to other tokens, such as those used only as utility and governance tokens, are not subject to licensing or regulation under the new DTSP regime and are not impacted. Whether a specific token falls outside the regulated categories is a legal question for your own advisers, not a marketing judgement.
They are Guidelines, not law. Do we have to follow them?
PS-G02 is issued as Guidelines and phrased in terms of what providers “should” do, which is a real distinction to take to counsel. But MAS used a binding Notice (PSN08) for the risk-warning duty in the same area and Guidelines for the advertising restriction, and for a licensed firm the practical exposure is supervisory rather than penal — a documented history of campaigns your regulator has said you should not run is an expensive thing to hold.
Where this leaves you
Most articles on this topic stop at the prohibition. The more useful observation is what the prohibition reveals. Strip a company of paid acquisition entirely and what remains is exactly the set of channels that compound: search, earned attention, owned properties, and a product people tell other people about. Singapore’s crypto sector is not being asked to market badly. It is being asked to market slowly.
If you run growth for a DPT service provider, the practical sequence is unglamorous. Confirm which regime your entity sits in after 30 June 2025. Audit every live placement against the paragraph 2.1 list, including anything an agency or affiliate is running on your behalf under paragraph 2.3. Turn off boosting on the owned accounts and write down why. Then move the budget that used to buy placement into the two things that still work — being findable, and being worth writing about.
If you would like help rebuilding an acquisition plan around search and content because paid is closed to you, that is a large part of what our SEO team in Singapore does. You can see the outcomes in our client case studies. For the foundations, start with our complete guide to SEO in Singapore; for the adjacent compliance picture, see our guides to influencer and KOL marketing and PDPA and marketing tracking, and to moneylender advertising rules in Singapore, the other regime where nearly every paid channel closes — and the one where advertising an unlicensed operator is itself the offence.
