Australia’s central bank announced that it moved to the next phase of its tokenized access Settlement Research Project, after selecting the industry participants and using cases to investigate how digital money and tokenization can support wholesale financial markets.
In a July 10 statementReserve Bank of Australia (RBA) said that the initiative, known as “Project Acacia”, had decided 24 innovative cases from a wide selection of organizations, from local fintechs to large banks, for the next step in the project.
There will be 19 pilot use cases involving Real money and real asset Transactions and five evidence -a -concepts (POC) use cases involving simulated transactions. Use cases involve a number of asset classes, including interest, private markets, trade claims and coal credits.
Project acacia var Launched In November 2024 as a joint initiative between RBA and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Center (DFCRC). It is also supported by Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) and the Australian Treasury.
The next step in the project aims to test a variety of settlement assets, including Stablecoinsbank deposits and pilot Wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) as well as new ways of using the banks’ existing exchange Settlement accounts at RBA.
Several major Australian banks, including the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Australia and New Zealand Banking Corporation and Westpac Banking Corporation, are among the pilot participants.
RBA also revealed that Pilot Grossist CBDC for testing of usage cases will be issued on a number of private and publicly permitted distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platforms, including Hedera, Redbelly Network, R3 Corda, Canvas Connect and other evidence (Evhereum virtual machine (Evhereum virtual machine (ev were
“Project Acacia represents an opportunity for further collaboration on tokenized asset markets and the future of money from the public and private sector in Australia,” said Brad Jones, assistant governor (financial system) at RBA. “The use cases chosen in this project will help us to better understand how innovations in the central bank and private digital money, along with payment infrastructure, can help increase the function for wholesale financing markets in Australia.”
He added “to ensure that Australia’s payments and monetary arrangements are appropriate to aim at digital age is a strategic priority for RBA.”
The use cases will be tested over the next six months, and a report on the project’s results will be expected to be published during the first quarter of 2026.
According to RBA, the results of this next step in the project will support the central bank’s ongoing research on how innovation in the financial system Can best support the Australian economy of the digital age.
The project’s partner agencies praised their development for the next test phase.
“Project Acacia will enable the industry and supervisory authorities to work together to learn more about how these use cases can reshape financial services, which can potentially increase efficiency and promote economic growth,” said Kate O’Rourke, ASIC Commissioner. “Asic looks useful Applications for the technologies behind digital assets in the wholesale markets. “
ASIC, Australia’s control sector regulator, is Provide regulatory relief to participants To support and streamline the project.
At the same time, Professor Talis Putnins, cheffators at DFCRC, emphasized the potential gains that the project could provide.
“Potential financial gains in markets and cross -border payments can be on the order of 19 billion a -air per year,” Putnins said. “Project Acacia is a significant step towards realizing these profits by providing evidence of the forms of money and decommissioning models that best enable tokenized real assets.”
He added that “the actual money settlement models are tested, including issuing Pilot Grossist CBDC on third-party platforms, reflects another world first for Australia in this rapidly developing area.”
Project acacia: launch and target
The initial phase of Project Acacia was launched in November 2024 RBA’s public consultationwhere it sought input from ecosystem players to participate in the studies on the role of Privately issued digital currencies and CBDCs to improve the tokenized asset market.
A core goal with Project Acacia is experimenting with a new form of tokenized central bank money, focusing on issuing third party blockchain networks, rather than being issued by the central bank itself.
In the case of third parties, the canceled project offers a variety of benefits, such as settlements between networks and acts as a bridge for different assets.
“The goal is to investigate how innovation in the wholesale markets can be made possible by new forms of digital money and supportive infrastructure,” said RBA’s Deputy Governor Brad Jones when the project was announced. “The role that tokenized asset markets can play to improve the efficiency and resilience of wholesale payments and settlements and to improve cross -border payments are areas of particular interest.”
Another goal of Project Acacia was to experiment with the deposit box, Stablecoins, reserve -supported digital currency and funds in exchange agreement accounts.
Now that the use cases and participation organizations have been selected, the project is taking their next step towards achieving these different goals.
Watch: Richard Baker on Engineering a smarter financial world with blockchain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xwwprpti1g Title = “Youtube video player” Ramborder = “0” Allow = “Accelerometer; Autoplay; Clipboard writing; encrypted media; Gyroscopes; Image-in-Image; Web-Share” Reference Policy = “Strict-Origin-When-Cross-Origin” Permitting Lorscreen = “” “” “”
