Project Acacia

Project Acacia is the Reserve Bank of Australia's wholesale CBDC and tokenised-asset settlement pilot, run jointly with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) and, on the regulatory side, with ASIC granting relief so pilot use cases could operate inside a defined perimeter. Following partner selection in 2025 and a 24-use-case pilot phase launched July 2025, RBA and DFCRC published the Project Acacia final report on 19 May 2026, testing 20 wholesale tokenised-asset use cases across the full asset lifecycle and settling against a mix of traditional Exchange Settlement Account (ESA) balances, a pilot wholesale CBDC, tokenised commercial bank deposits, and stablecoins (RBA media release MR-26-13). For an operator comparing APAC wholesale settlement pilots, Acacia is the most settlement-asset-agnostic of the region's programmes: rather than committing to a single settlement asset the way some peer pilots anchor on wCBDC or tokenised deposits specifically, Acacia deliberately tested multiple candidate settlement assets side by side.

What it is

Announced October 2024, Project Acacia’s central research question is which combination of public and private digital money (RBA-issued wholesale CBDC, tokenised commercial bank deposits, regulated stablecoins, and existing ESA balances) best supports settlement for tokenised wholesale asset markets in Australia, and under what market-structure and regulatory conditions. Phase 1 ran industry partner selection through 2025; the RBA announced the selected participants and ASIC’s regulatory relief for the pilot in a July 2025 media release (RBA media release MR-25-18), with test ledgers spanning Hedera, Redbelly, R3 Corda, and Canvas Connect.

Final report findings

Industry participants developed and tested 20 use cases spanning multiple asset classes, covering issuance, servicing, trading, and settlement. Per the final report and DFCRC’s own accompanying research, digital finance innovation of this kind could plausibly deliver AUD 24 billion in annual economic gains for Australia; that estimate is DFCRC’s modelling, not an RBA finding, and should be attributed to DFCRC specifically when cited. The report’s own emphasis is on demonstrated potential across the settlement-asset options tested rather than declaring a single winning design.

Next steps

Rather than a single production go-live, RBA and DFCRC set out a multi-stream follow-on programme: strengthened industry-regulator cooperation, development of a regulatory sandbox for digital financial market infrastructure, consideration of tokenised government bond issuance, continued work on interoperable commercial bank deposit tokens, and further RBA consultation on settlement-infrastructure adaptation and wholesale CBDC exploration. None of these streams carries a published funding or delivery date as of the final report’s publication.