Project Acacia Selects 24 Use Cases for Testing

Australia has taken a further step towards exploring how digital money and existing infrastructure rails could support the development of tokenised markets, after reaching the next stage of Project Acacia and selecting 24 use cases for testing.

Project Acacia is an initiative led by the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), which was launched in November 2024. It is also supported by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), and the Australian Treasury. It’s one of a few key projects highlighted in the Australian government’s digital strategy.

The latest update reveals that for the next stage of the project the RBA has selected a diverse range of market participants, including banks and fintechs across a range of asset classes, including fixed income, private markets, trade receivables and carbon credits for 19 pilot use cases and five proof of concept use cases.

The pilot use cases will involve real money and real asset transactions, while the PoCs will be simulated transactions. All 24 experiments will explore how innovations in digital money and existing settlement infrastructure might support the development of Australian wholesale tokenised asset markets.

ASIC, the Australian financial regulator, will provide regulatory relief to participants to support and streamline the pilot. The relief will also support the responsible testing of tokenised asset transactions, in some cases using CBDCs, in the coming months.

The proposed settlement assets for the use cases are stablecoins, bank deposit tokens and pilot wholesale CBDC, as well as new ways of using banks’ existing exchange settlement accounts at the RBA. The issuance of the pilot wholesale CBDC will take place on a range of private and public-permissioned DLT platforms, such as Hedera, Redbelly Network, R3 Corda and others.

“Ensuring that Australia’s payments and monetary arrangements are fit‑for‑purpose in the digital age is a strategic priority for the RBA and the Payments System Board,” says Brad Jones, assistant governor (financial system) at the RBA. “Project Acacia represents an opportunity for further collaborative exploration on tokenised asset markets and the future of money by the public and private sectors in Australia.”

Professor Talis Putnins, chief scientist at DFCRC notes that recent research suggests potential economic gains in markets and cross border payments could hit as much as AUD 19 billion per year, adding that Project Acacia is a significant step towards realising these gains.

Testing will take place in the next six months and a report on the findings will be published in the first quarter of 2026.