On 10 July 2025, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) announced that Project Acacia, a joint initiative between the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, had reached a significant milestone. Project Acacia is designed to explore how innovations in digital money and existing settlement infrastructure might support the development of Australian wholesale tokenised asset markets. This work is also being supported by ASIC, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), and the Australian Treasury. This project is one of the initiatives highlighted in the Australian Government’s March 2025 Statement on Developing an Innovative Australian Digital Asset Industry.
Milestone
The milestone relates to 24 innovative use cases from a diverse range of organisations, ranging from local fintechs to major banks, being conditionally selected for the next stage of Project Acacia. The use cases involve a range of asset classes, including fixed income, private markets, trade receivables and carbon credits. Proposed settlement assets for the use cases include stablecoins, bank deposit tokens, and pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), as well as new ways of using banks’ existing exchange settlement accounts at the RBA.
There will be:
- 19 pilot use cases, which will involve real money and real asset transactions.
- 5 proof-of-concept use cases involving simulated transactions.
Regulatory relief
ASIC is providing regulatory relief to participants of Project Acacia under ASIC Corporations (Project Acacia Participation Exemption) Instrument 2025/425.
The relief will support the responsible testing of tokenised asset transactions, in some cases using central bank digital currencies, between participants and a limited number of financial institutions in the coming months.