TL;DR
- The RBA has shifted from questioning tokenization’s role in wholesale markets to planning how infrastructure, settlement design and regulatory frameworks should evolve.
- Project Acacia is now feeding work on a new wholesale-market sandbox, with focus on wholesale CBDC, deposit tokens, stablecoins and RITS synchronization.
- The central bank is reviewing settlement-account access and stepping up cross-border payments work, signaling tokenization is becoming part of Australia’s broader market-modernization agenda.
Australia’s tokenization debate is starting to sound less like a philosophical exercise and more like an implementation agenda. The Reserve Bank of Australia is no longer asking whether tokenization belongs in wholesale markets, but how to build the rails around it. In a speech delivered March 25, Assistant Governor Brad Jones said the conversation has moved beyond short-term pilots and toward longer-term, stage-gated environments where ideas can progress toward commercialization. That shift reframes tokenization from a speculative concept into a market-structure question, one tied to settlement design, infrastructure access and regulatory learning in Australia.
From exploration to deployment planning
Project Acacia sits at the center of that change. What began as a research effort around digital money in wholesale tokenized asset markets is being used to map the next phase of infrastructure development. Jones said the RBA will work with the Digital Finance CRC on a new sandbox designed to support responsible innovation in wholesale markets. Areas of focus will include the interaction of wholesale CBDC with bank deposit tokens and stablecoins, along with the synchronization of tokenized asset ledgers with RITS, Australia’s interbank settlement system, as modernization planning moves ahead.
The policy agenda extends beyond one sandbox. The RBA is also beginning to treat tokenization as a broader systems issue touching payments access, settlement architecture and international competitiveness. Jones said the central bank will review its policies for which entities can access Exchange Settlement Accounts once the first tranche of the government’s payments licensing reforms has passed Parliament. At the same time, the RBA is engaging peer central banks on the competition and financial-stability implications of stablecoin issuers holding funds in central bank deposits, a question that could shape how tokenized money evolves inside regulated markets.
The broader message is difficult to miss. Australia’s central bank is signaling that tokenization is no longer something to watch from the sidelines if wholesale markets are to remain fit for the future. Jones argued that stronger coordination across public and private sectors is needed, and he linked the effort to larger national concerns around economic dynamism and technological disruption. He also said the RBA will step up work on cross-border payments with peer central banks, exploring how new forms of money and settlement infrastructure could improve wholesale international payments over time.
