Australia's Department of the Treasury updates on Project Acacia as RBA and DFCRC select 24 tokenised settlement use cases and ASIC grants regulatory relief

Australia's Department of the Treasury published an update on Project Acacia, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) initiative, confirming 24 use cases have been conditionally selected to test how digital money and existing settlement infrastructure could support Australian wholesale tokenised asset markets. The update also notes that the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is providing regulatory relief to streamline participation in the pilot phase. The next stage comprises 19 pilot use cases involving real money and real asset transactions and five proof-of-concept use cases involving simulated transactions, covering asset classes including fixed income, private markets, trade receivables and carbon credits. Proposed settlement assets include stablecoins, bank deposit tokens, pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) and new approaches to using banks’ existing exchange settlement accounts at the RBA, with pilot wholesale CBDC issuance for testing across private and public-permissioned distributed ledger technology platforms including Hedera, Redbelly Network, R3 Corda, Canvas Connect and other EVM-compatible networks; ASIC’s relief supports responsible testing of tokenised asset transactions between participants and a limited number of financial institutions, and the relief instrument has been published on the Federal Register of Legislation. Testing is expected to occur over the next six months, with a findings report due in the first quarter of 2026.