Our Blockchain Investigations Manager Fred Buret sat down for a discussion with Wern Jhien Yam, a Singapore-based lawyer at Setia Law with over a decade of experience in asset recovery and, more recently, a specialist focus on crypto and blockchain-related disputes. As both a major financial hub and a licensed digital asset market, Singapore presents a mature legal environment and a growing caseload that reflects just how much capital is now flowing through the jurisdiction.
Key Takeaways for Legal Professionals, Compliance Teams and Asset Recovery Practitioners
A Regulated but Rapidly Expanding Digital Asset Landscape
Singapore has positioned itself as one of the world’s leading hubs for digital asset businesses. Exchanges, foundations, DeFi projects, and custodians all operate under the DPT licensing regime administered by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. What makes Singapore increasingly distinct is the involvement of mainstream financial institutions: major local banks have entered the space directly, with one of the largest having launched its own licensed exchange. Alongside this, Singapore functions as a significant wealth management centre, with private banking structures and family offices allocating growing proportions of their portfolios to digital assets. This concentration of capital and regulated infrastructure sets the backdrop for an expanding dispute landscape.
The Four Classes of Crypto Cases
Wern Jhien outlined four types of cases his firm handles. The first is pre-litigation advice following hacks, thefts, or security breaches, where lawyers are called in to map out recovery strategies before any proceedings begin. The second is actual recovery litigation, where the work of forensic tracing informs whether a case is legally and economically viable before proceedings commence. The third is commercial disputes native to the crypto space: ICO contractual disagreements, shareholder and founder disputes, governance conflicts, and valuation claims where the subject of the contract happens to be tokens. The fourth is high-profile insolvency and restructuring cases, several of which have been centred in Singapore, where the core challenge is applying established insolvency frameworks to digital assets.
Token Valuation: A Persistent Legal Challenge
One of the most technically demanding aspects of crypto litigation in Singapore is the question of how to value tokens for the purposes of a claim. Courts face several compounding difficulties: the timing of valuation (at the point of incident, at current market price, or some average across the period), the absence of a regulated benchmark exchange comparable to a stock exchange, and, for non-cryptocurrency tokens such as governance or utility tokens, the question of how to derive value at all when the project may still be early-stage. Singapore judges have shown pragmatism, in one case applying an averaging methodology specifically to avoid either party benefiting from extreme price movements. The complexity of these questions also creates a strong incentive for parties to settle.
Recovery Procedures and the Full Gamut of Common Law Tools
Since Singapore courts recognized digital assets as a species of property, practitioners have had access to the complete toolkit of common law remedies. This includes pre-action discovery, tracing orders, Mareva injunctions, receivership orders, and post-enforcement tools. Notably, Singapore’s rules on judgment enforcement explicitly reference cryptocurrencies as recoverable property, which provides a clearer legal foundation than most jurisdictions. In fraud and hack cases, speed is critical: instructions typically arrive within 48 hours of an incident, and claims need to be assembled within a further 24 to 48 hours. Singapore courts have generally been cooperative in granting urgent hearing dates and giving proper weight to the evidence presented. For stablecoins specifically, direct engagement with issuers such as Tether or Circle to request a temporary hold or burn can be pursued in parallel with court proceedings.
Exchange Cooperation and the Limits of Geographical Reach
Exchange cooperation is uneven. Major exchanges generally comply with Singapore court orders even when headquartered in other jurisdictions. Smaller platforms require relationship-based approaches, and even within the same exchange, responses can be inconsistent across different matters. Many exchanges now request law enforcement involvement before acting on court orders alone, which adds friction to an already time-sensitive process. On the law enforcement side, Singapore police are capable but constrained: as a small jurisdiction, they are less inclined to pursue crimes or proceeds located overseas, and the resource limitations are real compared to larger jurisdictions like the US or EU. This places greater weight on coordinated private-channel action through forensic firms and legal representatives. Looking ahead, Wern Jhien expressed support for a harmonized cross-border framework that would allow exchanges to respond to credible evidence of fraud across jurisdictions, though acknowledged that the regulatory diversity involved makes this aspirational rather than near-term.
Watch the Full Session
This session illustrates why Singapore’s combination of a developed common law tradition, a proactive judiciary, and a high-density digital asset ecosystem makes it one of the most instructive jurisdictions for practitioners working on international crypto recovery matters. The challenges discussed, from valuation methodology to exchange engagement, are ones Recoveris encounters across every investigation we handle.
Watch the full webinar on YouTube https://youtu.be/MEms27Uv5xU
