Australia trials tokenised money including CBDC and stablecoins in wholesale markets

Australian financial authorities have revealed the next steps, including the private-sector participants, in their experimentation with the latest financial technologies in wholesale money markets.  

‘Project Acacia’ is a joint research project between the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) exploring how different forms of digital money and associated infrastructure could support the development of wholesale tokenised asset markets. The initiative, announced last year, is supported by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) and Australian Treasury.

The project has today (10 June) ‘reached a significant milestone’, an announcement declares, in that the industry participants have been selected and ASIC is to provide ‘regulatory relief’ to allow things to progress.

The announcement specifies that 24 ‘innovative’ pilot use cases from a ‘diverse’ range of organisations, including local fintech companies and major banks, have been ‘conditionally selected for this next stage of the project.’

Nineteen of the use cases will involve real money and real asset transactions. Five will be proof-of-concept use cases involving simulated transactions. The use cases involve a range of asset classes, including fixed income, private markets, trade receivables and carbon credits.

Proposed settlement assets for the use cases include bank deposit tokens, stablecoins and pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), as well as ‘new ways of using’ banks’ existing exchange settlement accounts at the RBA.

STABLECOINS & WHOLESALE CBDC: EXPLAINED Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value by having their market value pegged to an external reference, typically fiat currency. | Wholesale CBDC is a digital form of central bank money specifically designed for use by financial institutions and other large institutions for wholesale transactions.

Six months of testing

Fourteen private-sector organisations are named in the announcement as ‘lead’ use case participants.

The companies are: Australian Bond Exchange, Australia and New Zealand Banking Corporation (ANZ), Australian Payments Plus, Canvas, Catena Digital, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), Fireblocks, Forte Tech Solutions, Imperium Markets, Northern Trust, NotCentralised, ProspEx Group, Westpac Banking Corporation and Zerocap.

Testing of use cases is due to take place over the next six months. A report on the findings is expected to be published in the first quarter of 2026.

Issuance of pilot wholesale CBDC for testing use cases will occur on both private and public-permissioned distributed-ledger technology (DLT) platforms, including Hedera, Redbelly Network, R3 Corda, Canvas Connect and ‘other EVM-compatible networks’. ‘EVM’ stands for Ethereum Virtual Machine, which is computing engine that executes the code of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.

ANZ will lead use cases for tokenised trade payables and tokenised bonds.

The tokenised trade payables use case, for example, ‘aims to address working capital and cashflow challenges faced by suppliers and efficiency in overall financial operations,’ the banking group said in its own announcement today.

It will specifically explore how digital currencies including wholesale CBDC and tokenisation of Independent Payment Undertakings (IPUs) can automate settlement and ‘unlock new liquidity’ in wholesale markets. Also involved are Netwealth and MessageXchange with support from RMIT University in Melbourne.

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ASIC’s regulatory relief

“Ensuring that Australia’s payments and monetary arrangements are fit-for-purpose in the digital age is a strategic priority for the RBA and the Payments System Board,” said RBA assistant governor (financial system) Brad Jones in the announcement. “Project Acacia represents an opportunity for further collaborative exploration on tokenised asset markets and the future of money by the public and private sectors in Australia.”

“The use cases selected in this project will help us to better understand how innovations in central bank and private digital money, alongside payments infrastructure, might help to uplift the functioning of wholesale financial markets in Australia.”

ASIC is providing regulatory relief to participants to ‘support and streamline’ the pilot. The regulatory relief will ‘support the responsible testing of tokenised asset transactions, in some cases using CBDCs, between participants and a limited number of financial institutions in the coming months,’ the announcement explains, adding that ASIC has previously provided individual relief of a similar nature to participants in earlier RBA-led digital money projects.

“ASIC supports the responsible development of new technologies, including tokenisation and distributed ledgers,” said ASIC commissioner Kate O’Rourke. “ASIC sees useful applications for the technologies underlying digital assets in wholesale markets. The relief from regulatory requirements that we have announced today will allow these technologies to be sensibly tested – to explore opportunities and identify and tackle risks.”

“Importantly, Project Acacia will allow industry and regulators to work together to learn more about how these use cases may reshape the financial services industry, potentially boosting efficiency and foster economic growth,” O’Rourke added.

RELATED ARTICLE Australian authorities unveil three-year ‘roadmap’ for digital money explorations – a news story (26 September 2024) on a joint-paper from Australia’s Treasury and central bank

‘World-first for Australia’

The DFCRC is a 10-year, A$180m (about £105m / US$128m) research programme funded by industry, Australia’s government and universities.

“It is great to have collaboration from so many parts of the industry, from small fintechs to large banks, alongside the key financial regulators in this forward-looking, innovative project,” said DFCRC chief scientist Prof Talis Putnins. “The real-money settlement models being tested, including issuing pilot wholesale CBDC on third party platforms, reflects another world-first for Australia in this rapidly evolving field.”

“Recent research suggests potential economic gains in markets and cross border payments could be in the order of A$19 billion [about £9.2bn / US$12.5] per year,” he added. “Project Acacia is a significant step towards realising these gains, by providing evidence on the forms of money and settlement models that best enable tokenised real-world asset markets.”

A consultation paper on Project Acacia was released on 8 November 2024 calling on industry to express interest in getting involved. The DFCRC published a Project Acacia update on 28 February this year, revealing that ‘around 65’ submissions were received, either responding to consultation questions, expressing interest in participating in the experimentation or seeking to participate in an industry advisory group.

This followed the publication of a three-year ‘roadmap’ for digital money-related work by Australia’s Treasury and the RBA in September 2024. The joint-paper, titled ‘Central Bank Digital Currency and the Future of Digital Money in Australia’, concluded that a ‘clear public interest case’ to issue a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) has ‘yet to emerge’ in Australia. But it highlighted the role that a wholesale CBDC ‘alongside other forms of digital money and infrastructure upgrades’ could play in improving the functioning of wholesale financial markets.

RELATED ARTICLE BoE to assess stablecoins’ role in wholesale payments through Digi Securities Sandbox – a news story last week (4 July 2025) on developments in the UK – see below

BoE, stablecoins and wholesale markets

Just last week in the UK an executive director of Bank of England (BoE) said in a speech that the central bank is to “consider” stablecoins’ role in wholesale financial markets innovation through the UK’s Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS).

The DSS was launched just over nine months ago by the BoE and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as a testbed-style initiative to enable the UK financial regulators to curate the take-up of digital asset technology in financial markets.

In a speech titled ‘Building tomorrow’s markets: the digitalisation of finance’, executive director of financial market infrastructure Sasha Mills said the DSS had attracted “considerable interest, with new entrants and incumbents alike entering the regime.”

The BoE website contains ‘guidance on the operation of the DSS’ that states that ‘at present, we will not allow stablecoins or e-money to be used for money settlement in the DSS for any currency.’ It adds that ‘stablecoins and e-money are generally subject to different regulation and protections to commercial bank money and the Bank considers that they carry higher risks.’

“The Bank has always been clear that central bank money should be the primary settlement asset in the financial system, and we are innovating central bank money to ensure this remains the case,” Mills said in her speech. “But we are also open minded to stablecoins being able to provide innovation that could also be useful for wholesale markets. We are therefore considering the role that stablecoins could play in supporting innovation in the Digital Securities Sandbox. We will be putting out further information on this later in the year.”

Switzerland’s central bank and partnering organisations, meanwhile, are continuing to progress ‘Project Helvetia’, a multi-phase investigation exploring the settlement of tokenised assets in central bank money, specifically focusing on the integration of wholesale CBDC into existing financial systems.

RELATED ARTICLE Australia’s Treasury sets out legislative priorities for digital assets – a news story (24 March 2025) on a ‘Statement on Developing an Innovative Australian Digital Asset Industry’ as the government looks to ‘align with international best practice’ and ‘spur innovation and increase competition by providing certainty to industry’ – see below

Digital assets ‘rapidly evolving’

Australia’s Treasury published a summary of its priorities in the emerging arena of digital assets in March this year.

Digital assets – for example, cryptoassets – are described in the Treasury’s six-page ‘Statement on Developing an Innovative Australian Digital Asset Industry’ as a ‘rapidly evolving part of the economy, offering opportunities for new products and productivity gains’.

Legislative reforms ‘will extend existing financial services laws to key digital asset platforms, but not to all of the digital asset ecosystem,’ the Treasury stated, explains that its planned approach was influenced by action in jurisdictions such as the 27-member European Union (EU) and Singapore.

Four main elements to Australia’s approach to digital asset reforms were highlighted.

They were: to introduce a framework for digital asset platforms (abbreviated to ‘DAPs’) – online platforms that hold digital assets for consumers; to introduce a framework for payment stablecoins, which will be treated as a type of stored-value facility (SVF) under the government’s payments licensing reforms; to review an ASIC-operated Enhanced Regulatory Sandbox; and to implement what it describes as a ‘suite of initiatives to investigate ways to safely unlock the potential benefits of digital asset technology across financial markets and the broader Australian economy.’