The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) have conditionally selected 24 industry use cases for the next stage of Project Acacia, a research initiative examining how digital money and existing settlement infrastructure could support Australian wholesale tokenised asset markets. Supporting the pilots, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is providing regulatory relief to streamline participant testing of tokenised asset transactions, including in some cases using central bank digital currency (CBDC). Of the selected use cases, 19 are pilots involving real money and real asset transactions and five are proof-of-concept tests using simulated transactions. The use cases span asset classes including fixed income, private markets, trade receivables and carbon credits, with proposed settlement assets including stablecoins, bank deposit tokens, a pilot wholesale CBDC and new approaches to using banks’ existing exchange settlement accounts at the RBA. Pilot wholesale CBDC issuance for testing is planned across multiple private and public-permissioned distributed ledger technology platforms, including Hedera, Redbelly Network, R3 Corda, Canvas Connect and other EVM-compatible networks, with lead participants including Australian Bond Exchange, Australia and New Zealand Banking Corporation, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corporation, Northern Trust and others. Testing is scheduled to run over the next six months, with a findings report expected in the first quarter of 2026. ASIC’s relief is intended to enable responsible testing between participants and a limited number of financial institutions in the coming months, and the relief instrument has been published on the Federal Register of Legislation.
Reserve Bank of Australia 2025-07-10
Reserve Bank of Australia and DFCRC select Project Acacia pilot participants as ASIC grants regulatory relief for tokenised asset settlement testing
The Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre have selected 24 industry use cases for Project Acacia to explore digital money's role in Australian wholesale tokenised asset markets, with regulatory relief from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. The initiative includes 19 pilots with real transactions and five proof-of-concept tests, involving various asset classes and settlement assets, with testing over six months and a report due in early 2026.