The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) plans to explore a new digital financial market infrastructure (DFMI) sandbox with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), marking a shift from short term pilots toward a longer term environment where industry can progress tokenized finance to commercialization. But the timeline remains unclear, with the RBA sequencing the work after the government’s review of sandbox arrangements.
The sandbox was the headline deliverable from a speech by RBA Assistant Governor Brad Jones previewing findings from Project Acacia, a collaborative research initiative with the DFCRC and industry that examined how tokenized money and assets could enhance Australia’s wholesale markets. Twenty use cases were explored across a range of asset classes and settlement arrangements, involving banks, custodians, fintechs, fund managers, stablecoin issuers and infrastructure operators.
Jones framed the RBA’s position as having moved from asking whether tokenization has a future in Australia’s financial system to asking how. The DFCRC has estimated potential economic gains from tokenization in the order of A$24 billion ($17bn) per year.
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