Australia Central Bank and Partners Launch 24 Tokenized Asset Settlement Pilots → Adoption

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Briefing

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) have initiated the next phase of Project Acacia, selecting 24 industry-led use cases to test tokenized asset settlement, a move that fundamentally shifts the Australian wholesale financial market toward atomic settlement and continuous operation. This public-private collaboration is the necessary mechanism for establishing a national, regulatory-compliant framework for digital money and tokenized assets, immediately addressing counterparty and liquidity risks inherent in legacy T+2 systems. The scale of this strategic pivot is quantified by the commitment to run 19 of the 24 selected use cases as real-money, real-asset transactions , ensuring the generated data is immediately actionable for policy and market infrastructure development.

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Context

Traditional wholesale financial markets are characterized by fragmented settlement layers, requiring multi-day clearing cycles (T+2) and necessitating large, idle liquidity buffers to manage counterparty risk across numerous intermediaries. This conventional process introduces significant capital inefficiency, limits the trading of less liquid assets, and creates systemic vulnerabilities due to the time lag between trade execution and final settlement. The prevailing challenge is the reliance on siloed, batch-processed systems that cannot support the continuous, high-velocity demands of a modern, global financial ecosystem.

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Analysis

This integration directly alters the wholesale settlement and treasury management systems by introducing a unified, DLT-based settlement layer. The cause-and-effect chain begins with the tokenization of assets (e.g. bonds, trade receivables) and the settlement currency (deposit tokens, CBDC), enabling atomic, T+0 settlement. This eliminates the principal-risk exposure and drastically reduces the need for pre-funded liquidity, which frees up capital for more productive use across the enterprise and its partners. For the industry, this is significant because it validates a hybrid model where central bank-backed money and private digital money can co-exist on a shared ledger, creating a more robust, 24/7 financial market infrastructure capable of supporting the fractionalization and instant transfer of previously illiquid asset classes.

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Parameters

Core Initiative → Project Acacia
Lead Authorities → Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC)
Key Participants → Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, Westpac, Northern Trust
Use Case Volume → 24 Total Use Cases (19 Real-Money Pilots)
Settlement Assets → Bank Deposit Tokens, Stablecoins, Pilot Wholesale CBDC
DLT Platforms → Hedera, Redbelly Network, R3 Corda, EVM-Compatible Chains

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Outlook

The immediate outlook involves a six-month execution phase for the 19 real-money pilots, generating a definitive dataset on the operational and regulatory performance of various digital money forms. The second-order effect will be the rapid establishment of a national standard for tokenized asset issuance and settlement, pressuring other major financial jurisdictions to accelerate their own public-private DLT frameworks. This initiative is positioned to establish a new benchmark for regulatory-sanctioned financial market infrastructure, driving capital market participants toward a T+0 settlement model globally.

Project Acacia represents a foundational, government-backed mandate to rewrite the core settlement mechanics of a national wholesale market, signaling the inevitable, system-level convergence of traditional finance and distributed ledger technology.

Signal Acquired from → rba.gov.au