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RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia)

Central bank

The Reserve Bank of Australia is Australia's central bank and on tokenisation it is the agency running the most concrete wholesale-CBDC and tokenised-asset settlement pilot in APAC outside the HKMA's Project Ensemble. Project Acacia, announced in October 2024 and led by the RBA in collaboration with Treasury, ASIC, and the Digital Finance CRC, covers tokenised wholesale settlement, smart payments, FX, and repo, with multiple use-case streams running through 2025 and 2026 and named bank, asset-manager, and infrastructure participants. For a tokenisation operator, the RBA is the wholesale-settlement counterparty for any AUD-denominated tokenised flow that wants central-bank-money settlement, and the agency whose published Acacia outputs are the closest Australia comes to the kind of architectural patterns that MAS Project Guardian produces.

Role in tokenisation

The RBA's tokenisation surface has three load-bearing components. First, Project Acacia. The pilot is structured as a series of use-case streams covering tokenised settlement of corporate bonds, tokenised repo, tokenised FX, and smart-payment constructions including conditional and atomic payment release. The RBA acts as the issuer of a wholesale-CBDC pilot token used as the settlement asset, with named participating institutions running the asset-side leg on their own infrastructure. Phase 1 partner selection ran through 2025 following the October 2024 announcement; Phase 2 testing extends into 2025 and 2026.

Second, the broader payments-system supervisory remit. The RBA is the regulator for designated payment systems under the Payment Systems (Regulation) Act, with Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System (RITS) the high-value RTGS settlement system and the New Payments Platform (NPP) the real-time retail payment rail. Tokenised AUD constructions that want central-bank-money settlement will need to interact with RITS at some level; the architectural question Acacia is testing is whether that interaction is via direct tokenisation of reserve balances (a true wholesale CBDC), via a tokenised-deposit construction with conventional RTGS settlement of bank-to-bank legs, or via a hybrid bridging arrangement.

Third, the cross-border CBDC and tokenised-deposit experiment portfolio. The BIS Innovation Hub Sydney centre anchors AUD legs in Project Mariana (cross-border AMM-based wCBDC), Project Agorá (multi-currency tokenised commercial bank money with seven central banks, see Project Agorá), and the longer-tail experiment portfolio. The RBA's posture in these is as a participating central bank rather than a lead operator, which is the inverse of its Acacia role.

Operating model

The RBA's regulatory toolkit on tokenisation runs through three distinct routes. The wholesale-settlement experimentation route covers Project Acacia and the BIS Innovation Hub Sydney portfolio, with the RBA acting as central-bank-money issuer for pilot purposes and as the operational venue for cross-bank settlement. The payments-system supervision route covers the RITS and NPP infrastructures, with tokenised-AUD constructions evaluated for designation under the Payment Systems (Regulation) Act if they reach material scale. The monetary-policy and financial-stability route covers the broader question of how tokenised commercial bank money interacts with monetary-policy transmission and with the deposit-funding base of the Australian banking system.

Acacia's structural design is the most operationally consequential element. The pilot tests a tiered-ledger architecture in which the wholesale-CBDC pilot token (issued by the RBA) sits at the central-bank-money layer; tokenised commercial bank deposits sit at the bank-money layer; tokenised assets (bonds, fund interests, commodities) sit at the asset layer; and atomic settlement runs across the three layers. The participating institutions span Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac, NAB, ANZ, and Macquarie on the bank side, with asset managers and infrastructure providers on the asset side. The named participant set has been published in tranches as the pilot has progressed.

The design choice that distinguishes Acacia from prior AUD tokenisation experiments (the 2022 CBDC pilot programme led by the RBA and the Digital Finance CRC) is the explicit focus on tokenised wholesale settlement of real assets rather than retail-CBDC user-experience testing. Retail CBDC has been effectively de-prioritised by the RBA, with the public posture being that the case for retail CBDC has not been made; wholesale CBDC and tokenised commercial bank money are treated as the load-bearing tokenisation work.

Why it matters

For a tokenisation operator running AUD-denominated flows, the RBA's posture determines whether central-bank-money settlement is available for tokenised AUD constructions. Without a Fed-equivalent permissive posture, AUD-denominated tokenisation defaults to commercial-bank-money settlement (tokenised deposits, AUD stablecoins where they exist) with conventional RTGS for the bank-to-bank leg. With a permissive posture, the RBA's pilot wholesale-CBDC token becomes the canonical settlement asset for atomic DvP (delivery-versus-payment) at the asset-cash level. Acacia is the public test of which path the RBA takes.

The competitive frame within APAC puts Australia at the closest equivalent of MAS Project Guardian or HKMA Project Ensemble, but with a narrower asset-class scope (Acacia is more focused on wholesale-settlement use cases than Guardian's cross-asset workstream model) and a tighter central-bank-led structure (Acacia is RBA-operated; Guardian and Ensemble are regulator-coordinated with industry-operated pilots). The cross-border frame puts the RBA in the second tier of central-bank tokenisation work (BIS Innovation Hub Sydney, Project Mariana, Project Agorá) behind the HKMA, MAS, and the BoJ on profile but ahead of most other APAC central banks.

The longer-tail question is graduation: whether Acacia produces a production wholesale-settlement asset, or whether the pilot remains a long-running experiment without a publication-quality production endpoint. The political-economy backdrop is that retail CBDC has been effectively foreclosed; wholesale CBDC and tokenised-deposit infrastructure remain the active surface.

Recent moves

  • 25 March 2026. Acacia Phase 2 update speech (RBA Assistant Governor speech, 25 Mar 2026) flagged the Phase 2 report as expected in Q1 2026 with structural-architecture findings on the cross-asset and cross-ledger DvP design and on the wholesale-tokenised-money settlement-asset choice question.
  • 2025-2026. Phase 2 testing extends, with use-case streams running in parallel.
  • July 2025. RBA and DFCRC announced Acacia Phase 2 participants and 24 selected use cases, with ASIC providing regulatory relief to allow the use cases to operate inside the pilot perimeter outside their normal AFSL constraints (RBA media release MR-25-18). The use-case set spans tokenised bank deposit tokens, regulated stablecoins, wholesale CBDC, and Exchange Settlement Account (ESA) balances; the test ledgers are Hedera, Redbelly, R3 Corda, and Canvas Connect. The breadth of asset classes and ledger choices is structurally distinctive: most central-bank tokenised-asset pilots commit to a single ledger or asset-class scope, where Acacia Phase 2 explicitly tests across multiple ledgers and across all four major settlement-asset categories simultaneously.
    1. Phase 1 partner selection completed; named bank participants include Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB, ANZ, Macquarie.
  • October 2024. Project Acacia announced, with phased partner selection and use-case streams including tokenised settlement, smart payments, FX, and repo.
    1. Initial CBDC pilot programme led by RBA and Digital Finance CRC, with retail and wholesale use cases tested in a sandbox setting.
  • BIS Innovation Hub Sydney centre continues to anchor AUD legs in Project Mariana, Project Agorá, and related cross-border experiments.

Open questions

  • Whether Project Acacia produces a production-grade wholesale settlement asset or remains a pilot, and which use-case streams (FX, repo, tokenised securities settlement) graduate first.
  • Whether the RBA publishes architectural opinions on tiered-ledger design at the depth that MAS publishes on purpose-bound money or HKMA on Project Ensemble. To date, the RBA's published outputs have been more pilot-progress than architectural-guidance.
  • Whether retail CBDC remains foreclosed in the medium term, or whether shifts in payment-system structure (declining cash use, NPP saturation) reopen the question.
  • The interaction between the RBA's wholesale-settlement work and APRA's prudential treatment of bank participation in tokenised-deposit and tokenised-asset markets. APRA has been more conservative than the RBA on the activity side.
  • Agentic commerce posture. The RBA has not published on AI agents holding tokenised AUD or transacting on Acacia infrastructure on behalf of beneficial owners.

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