Australia has taken a significant step toward a digital currency, although this effort is aimed at institutions rather than everyday consumers. The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has launched a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot called “Project Acacia,” which will use real money and real assets to test practical applications.
Over the next six months, the RBA and its industry partners will examine how a wholesale CBDC could improve efficiency across financial markets. The pilot concentrates on institutional use cases such as bond settlement, private market transactions, and carbon credit trading rather than retail payments like buying coffee.
By targeting wholesale markets, the RBA seeks to make institutional finance faster, less costly, and more transparent. Participants in the tests include distributed ledger platforms and enterprise network providers such as Hedera and R3 Corda. The pilot is structured to replicate actual market conditions, enabling assessment of settlement finality, interoperability with existing systems, and operational resilience.
Key goals of Project Acacia include reducing settlement risk, shortening transaction times, and enabling atomic delivery versus payment (DvP) workflows that can link digital cash and tokenized assets. The RBA and partners will explore how tokenised securities and digital cash could interact within regulated market infrastructure, and whether automation via smart contracts can streamline processes like corporate actions, asset transfers, and collateral management.
While retail CBDCs focus on public use, wholesale CBDCs are specifically designed for financial institutions, market infrastructures, and large-scale liquidity management. Project Acacia’s emphasis on wholesale applications is intended to evaluate whether central bank-issued digital money could plug into existing settlement systems or stand alongside them as a complementary tool.
The pilot will also consider governance, legal frameworks, and compliance requirements necessary for integrating a wholesale CBDC into institutional workflows. This includes testing reconciliation processes, auditing capabilities, and controls to ensure that digital cash operates within the regulatory and oversight frameworks that govern traditional wholesale payments.
Industry participants will help validate technical approaches such as token custody, permissioning models, and cross-platform interoperability. These tests are meant to reveal practical constraints and design choices, for example how a wholesale CBDC could be issued, held, transferred, and extinguished in coordination with existing central bank accounts and commercial settlement systems.
The RBA plans to publish a report next year detailing the pilot’s findings, lessons learned, and potential next steps. That report will inform policymakers, market operators, and financial institutions about the practicality and implications of adopting a wholesale CBDC in Australia’s financial ecosystem.
In summary, Project Acacia represents a pragmatic, institution-focused approach to central bank digital currency research, prioritising improvements to wholesale market efficiency, transparency, and resilience rather than retail adoption.