Paul Stonham
The RBA and DFCRC released the findings of Project Acacia yesterday, and for anyone working in or around Australia’s wholesale financial markets, it warrants a close read.
The headline finding is this: tokenisation works. Across 20 real-world use cases, spanning multiple asset classes and the full asset lifecycle. From issuance through to settlement, the project demonstrated that tokenised assets, settled using wholesale CBDC, tokenised commercial bank deposits or stablecoins, can materially improve how wholesale market’s function. Faster settlement, reduced counterparty risk, better capital efficiency, automated asset servicing. These benefits were tested and observed, not modelled in a spreadsheet.
That matters. There has been no shortage of enthusiasm about tokenisation over the past several years. What has been in shorter supply is rigorous, regulator-backed validation. Project Acacia provides that.
The technology question has been answered, the coordination question hasn’t
What strikes me most in today’s release is the RBA’s candour about where the real challenges now sit. The report explicitly identifies “challenges to scaling” and the need for deeper regulatory and industry coordination. That’s an honest assessment, and an important one.
In my experience, this is exactly the pattern you see when financial market infrastructure matures. The capability gets proven. Then the hard work begins; getting regulators aligned, getting industry to agree on common frameworks, and making sure the underlying plumbing, in this case the RBA’s own settlement infrastructure, is fit for purpose.
The 11-point action plan released alongside the findings addresses all three. A regulatory sandbox for digital financial market infrastructure. A standing industry-regulator advisory group. Consultation on ESA access and RITS upgrades. Continued wholesale CBDC research. These aren’t vague intentions, they’re structured workstreams with named participants and clear scope.
Why market structure now becomes the central question
The RBA’s focus on wholesale markets and settlement infrastructure brings something important to the fore. When settlement becomes programmable and near instantaneous, the traditional boundaries between issuance, trading and settlement start to blur. That creates genuine opportunities for liquidity, price discovery and capital management. It also raises questions about how you maintain cohesive, well-functioning markets as the infrastructure shifts.
These are questions the industry needs to engage with seriously over the coming months, and I’ll be looking at them more closely as I work through the full report.
The number worth keeping in mind
The DFCRC estimates digital finance innovation could deliver $24 billion in annual economic gains for Australia. That number only becomes real if the regulatory and market structure work keeps pace with the capability that Project Acacia has now demonstrated.
Australia achieved genuine world firsts today, including the issuance of pilot wholesale CBDC onto both public and private distributed ledger infrastructure. The question now is whether the momentum from that achievement translates into real-world adoption.
I’ll be going deeper into the findings over the coming days. But the initial read is clear: the technology case has been made. The work ahead is about coordination, structure and infrastructure. That’s harder, but it’s also more tractable than it was twelve months ago.
By Paul Stonham, Chief Commercial Officer