The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) have unveiled a new roadmap for tokenised finance after Project Acacia found digital money and tokenised assets could materially improve the efficiency, resilience and functionality of Australia’s wholesale financial markets.
The final report outlined how 20 use cases across fixed income, managed funds, repos, structured products, carbon credits, trade payables and private markets tested tokenised assets alongside wholesale CBDC, tokenised bank deposits and stablecoins.
Project Acacia was launched in November 2024 with a consultation paper before assessing use cases in July 2025 and explored how tokenised assets and money could improve wholesale markets.
According to the report, the experiments demonstrated opportunities to improve capital efficiency, reduce settlement frictions and counterparty risk, automate lifecycle management and provide access to 24/7 liquidity pools.
The RBA and DFCRC said tokenisation had the potential to materially improve wholesale market processes across issuance, servicing, trading and settlement, particularly in fixed-income markets where workflows remain highly manual and fragmented.
Among the key findings was that programmable settlement and smart contract functionality could compress settlement cycles, reduce operational errors and improve collateral efficiency by freeing up capital tied to lengthy settlement windows.
Several use cases also demonstrated how atomic settlement — where payment and asset transfer occur simultaneously — could reduce timing gaps and settlement risk while enabling continuously available settlement infrastructure operating on a 24/7 basis.
The report found tokenisation could also create new funding and liquidity channels by broadening investor access and improving transparency in wholesale markets.
At the same time, Project Acacia reinforced the continued importance of central bank money as the “anchor and enabler” of the financial system, even as private forms of tokenised money expand.
The project tested multiple settlement approaches, including pilot wholesale CBDC issued directly onto third-party distributed ledger infrastructure, tokenised commercial bank deposits, stablecoins and synchronisation models linking tokenised assets with existing settlement systems.
BTC Markets chief commercial officer Paul Stonham said the project provided long-awaited validation for tokenisation in wholesale markets.
“The headline finding is this: tokenisation works. Across 20 real-world use cases, spanning multiple asset classes and the full asset lifecycle. From issuance through to settlement, the project demonstrated that tokenised assets, settled using wholesale CBDC, tokenised commercial bank deposits or stablecoins, can materially improve how wholesale market’s function,” Stonham said.
“Faster settlement, reduced counterparty risk, better capital efficiency, automated asset servicing. These benefits were tested and observed, not modelled in a spreadsheet.”
Stonham said the report marked an important shift in the debate around digital finance infrastructure.
“There has been no shortage of enthusiasm about tokenisation over the past several years. What has been in shorter supply is rigorous, regulator-backed validation. Project Acacia provides that,” he said.
“The technology question has been answered. The coordination question hasn’t.”
The report itself highlighted several barriers to broader adoption, including legal and regulatory uncertainty, interoperability issues between digital platforms and coordination challenges across market participants.
Industry participants involved in the project also pointed to the need for stronger collaboration between issuers, buy-side firms, custodians and infrastructure providers if tokenised markets were to scale domestically.
Project Acacia found many market participants believed Australia’s existing experimentation frameworks had been too limited and short term to support commercial adoption pathways, while uncertainty around licensing, settlement finality and the treatment of digital assets continued to constrain investment.
Stonham said the RBA had been unusually direct about where the next stage of work would focus.
“What strikes me most in today’s release is the RBA’s candour about where the real challenges now sit. The report explicitly identifies ‘challenges to scaling’ and the need for deeper regulatory and industry coordination,” he said.
“In my experience, this is exactly the pattern you see when financial market infrastructure matures. The capability gets proven. Then the hard work begins; getting regulators aligned, getting industry to agree on common frameworks, and making sure the underlying plumbing, in this case the RBA’s own settlement infrastructure, is fit for purpose.”
The RBA, DFCRC and Council of Financial Regulators agencies have proposed a multi-stream work program that includes exploration of a digital financial market infrastructure sandbox, expansion of industry-regulator advisory groups, consultation on exchange settlement account access and settlement infrastructure upgrades, and further wholesale CBDC research.
The roadmap also includes continued work on interoperable commercial bank deposit tokens, a tokenised government bond initiative, and exploration of how tokenised money and upgraded infrastructure could improve cross-border payments.
Stonham said the next phase of development would increasingly centre on market structure.
“When settlement becomes programmable and near instantaneous, the traditional boundaries between issuance, trading and settlement start to blur. That creates genuine opportunities for liquidity, price discovery and capital management,” he said.
“It also raises questions about how you maintain cohesive, well-functioning markets as the infrastructure shifts.”
Project Acacia also achieved what the report described as world-first experimentation involving the issuance of pilot wholesale CBDC onto both public and private distributed ledger infrastructure.
The report said the RBA issued $4.4 million in pilot wholesale CBDC during the project, with transactions of up to $250,000 completed across several use cases.
Stonham said the challenge now would be translating experimentation into adoption.
“The DFCRC estimates digital finance innovation could deliver $24 billion in annual economic gains for Australia. That number only becomes real if the regulatory and market structure work keeps pace with the capability that Project Acacia has now demonstrated,” he said.
“The technology case has been made. The work ahead is about coordination, structure and infrastructure.”
