Project Acacia: Australia's leap into tokenised finance
- Contributors
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
Project Acacia, a collaborative initiative between the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), was announced in November 2024, with the aim of exploring the role of digital money in wholesale financial markets. Now, the project has reached a major milestone with the conditional selection of more than 20 use cases designed to test real-world applications of tokenised assets and digital settlement models.
The use cases span a wide range of asset classes, including corporate bonds, trade receivables, carbon credits, and government securities. Settlement assets include stablecoins, bank deposit tokens, and a pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), issued across platforms such as Hedera, Redbelly Network, R3 Corda, Canvas Connect, and other EVM-compatible chains.
Among the standout pilots:
Australian Bond Exchange will test secondary market transactions in tokenised corporate bonds, using smart contracts for lifecycle events like coupon payments.
ANZ is trialing tokenised trade payables settled with its A$DC stablecoin and wholesale CBDC, comparing performance across private and public networks.
Australian Payments Plus is building a token interchange service on Hedera, enabling seamless exchange between stablecoins and deposit tokens, with CBDC as the bridge.
Forte Tech Solutions is tokenising Australian Government Bonds on Ethereum, backed by reserves in an Exchange Settlement Account.
NotCentralised is piloting a tokenised asset backed securities (ABS) in this use case backed by receivables, using zero-knowledge tech for on-chain confidentiality.
As DFCRC Chief Scientist Professor Talis Putnins stated in an update regarding the initiative in July this year:
The real money settlement models being tested… reflect another world‑first for Australia in this rapidly evolving field.
He added that the project could unlock:
economic gains… in the order of AU $19 billion per year.
With ASIC providing targeted regulatory relief, Project Acacia is more than a sandbox - it’s a proving ground for blockchain innovation. The final report, expected in Q1 2026, could shape the next generation of Australia’s financial infrastructure and help turn the narrative of blockchain and crypto towards other jurisdictions which are harnessing these opportunities and the future of finance.
Written by Steven Pettigrove and Luke Higgins with Michael Bacina