Reserve Bank of Australia and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre conditionally select 24 Project Acacia use cases for wholesale tokenised asset testing with ASIC regulatory relief

The Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre have advanced Project Acacia by conditionally selecting 24 industry use cases to test how innovations in digital money and existing settlement infrastructure could support Australian wholesale tokenised asset markets. The work is supported by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the Australian Treasury, and was highlighted in the Government’s March 2025 Statement on Developing an Innovative Australian Digital Asset Industry. The next stage comprises 19 pilot use cases involving real money and real asset transactions and five proof-of-concept use cases using simulated transactions, spanning 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 ways of using banks’ existing Exchange Settlement Accounts at the Reserve Bank of Australia; pilot wholesale CBDC issuance for testing will occur across private and public-permissioned distributed ledger technology platforms including Hedera, Redbelly Network, R3 Corda, Canvas Connect and other EVM-compatible networks. To support participation, ASIC is providing regulatory relief to streamline the pilot, enabling responsible testing of tokenised asset transactions, including in some cases using CBDCs, between participants and a limited number of financial institutions. Testing is scheduled to run for six months, with a report on findings expected in the first quarter of 2026. The ASIC relief instrument is available on the Federal Register of Legislation.