The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) have published the final report from Project Acacia, a tokenization research project exploring digital money and settlement infrastructure for wholesale asset markets.
The project ran 20 use cases developed by domestic and international participants ranging from banks and fintechs to fund managers and exchanges. Twelve were live pilots involving real money and real assets, with the remainder operating as proofs of concept. Fixed income was the most prevalent asset class, consistent with international experience, though experiments also covered other use cases, featuring four interchange or settlement solutions for exchanging various stablecoins or deposit tokens.
Settlement was tested using multiple forms of money, from traditional central bank reserve balances and a pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) through to tokenized commercial bank deposits and stablecoins. The DFCRC has previously estimated that full scale tokenization could deliver approximately A$24 billion per annum in economic gains, though on the current trajectory only around A$1 billion would be realized by 2030.
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