The Reserve Bank of Australia has moved beyond asking whether tokenised assets matter and is now concentrating on how they can be integrated into wholesale financial infrastructure. That shift, described in March 2026 by Assistant Governor Brad Jones, signals that the discussion has moved from theory to implementation.
The change follows Project Acacia, a multi-case pilot that examined ledger-based settlement, tokenised money and private stablecoins across institutional use cases. In practical terms, the RBA is now treating tokenisation as a market-structure issue tied to interoperability, resilience and real-world deployment rather than as a purely experimental technology theme.
From pilot design to market infrastructure
The economic case behind that shift is significant. The RBA and the Digital Finance CRC estimate that tokenisation could unlock about $24 billion a year in benefits while also shortening settlement cycles, lowering counterparty risk and improving auditability in wholesale markets. That framing helps explain why the central bank is now devoting more attention to operational design and coordination.
Project Acacia, launched in July 2025, tested twenty use cases and completed nineteen pilot transactions with institutional participants. The scope of the exercise was broad, covering government and corporate bonds, repos, bank term deposits, investment funds, trade payables, mining royalties, carbon credits and private credit funds. The point was not simply to test isolated products, but to see how tokenised assets could function across different segments of wholesale finance.
The project also examined multiple forms of settlement money. The RBA looked at wholesale central bank digital currency and Exchange Settlement Account balances alongside tokenised private money such as stablecoins and bank deposit tokens. On the technology side, the pilots combined permissioned infrastructure and interoperability layers, including Hedera’s HashSphere, Hgraph, Utila and Australian Payments Plus in work tied to atomic swaps and integration with RITS.
A wholesale-first strategy is taking shape
The RBA has been careful to frame tokenisation as an evolutionary market change rather than a stand-alone technical experiment. Officials drew a clear distinction between digitally native issuance, where the token itself is the primary record of value, and digital twins, which mirror off-ledger records and are seen as the more practical near-term option under current legal and operational constraints.
That same pragmatism is shaping the Bank’s CBDC priorities. Brad Jones made clear that the RBA sees more immediate value in a wholesale CBDC than in a retail version, arguing that the benefits are more promising and the challenges less problematic in wholesale settings. The emphasis, for now, is on reducing settlement frictions and operational risk without disrupting existing prudential frameworks.
To move beyond pilots, the RBA is preparing a Digital Financial Market Infrastructure Sandbox designed to test scalability, interoperability and integration with the country’s real-time gross settlement system over longer and more structured windows. Alongside that, the Bank is pushing for deeper industry coordination through a joint regulator-industry tokenisation advisory group, an expanded deposit-token working group and C-suite engagement intended to align market responses.
The policy agenda is widening as well. The RBA has flagged a review of access to Exchange Settlement Accounts and stronger coordination with peer central banks on wholesale cross-border payments, while warning that it may step in if industry progress on future account-to-account processing stalls. The final Project Acacia report, due later in 2026, now looks set to serve as a practical roadmap for firms that need to prepare their custody, settlement and compliance workflows for a more tokenised wholesale market.