Project Acacia has now tested how tokenized asset markets could settle in Australia.

The Reserve Bank of Australia and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre released findings from Project Acacia, a wholesale experiment that moved digital money and tokenization from policy theory into market plumbing.

The project tested 20 wholesale tokenized asset market use cases across issuance, servicing, trading, and settlement, spanning fixed income, managed funds, repos, structured products, private markets, carbon credits, and trade payables.

The key result is about money, rather than the asset wrapper. Institutions need finality, legal certainty, liquidity, and operational reliability at the same time, and the settlement asset determines whether tokenized rails can carry real volume.

Project Acacia put four candidates in the same frame: traditional RBA exchange settlement account balances, a pilot wholesale central bank digital currency, tokenized forms of commercial bank deposits, and stablecoins.

That makes Project Acacia a live case study for every institutional tokenization push. Tokenized markets only scale when the cash leg can keep pace with the asset leg without creating new settlement risk.

Project Acacia shows the cash leg is the bottleneck

A tokenized bond, repo, fund unit, or carbon credit can trade on new rails, but the market still needs a trusted way to pay for it.

If the cash leg sits outside the tokenized platform, participants need synchronization between legacy payment systems and asset ledgers. If the cash leg is issued by a bank, the market needs interoperability across banks.

If the cash leg is a stablecoin, it needs credible reserves, redemption, and licensing. If the cash leg is central bank money, the question becomes who can access it and how far the central bank wants that money to operate outside existing settlement systems.

The RBA Project Acacia final report identified potential benefits across the asset lifecycle, including shorter settlement cycles, lower counterparty risk, better capital efficiency, automated servicing, and fewer operational errors.

Those gains speak to institutional costs that retail crypto trading often hides: reconciliation, failed settlement, collateral movement, prefunding, custody controls, and legal finality.

The report also points to the limits of a technology-only thesis. Interoperability, legal and regulatory uncertainty, industry coordination, liquidity fragmentation, and liquidity tied up in pre-funded trades remain live barriers.

Tokenization may reduce some frictions, but settlement money decides whether the new system becomes a market or another set of disconnected platforms.

The RBA’s materials frame central bank money and settlement infrastructure as an anchor for tokenized wholesale asset markets, while leaving room for private digital money such as stablecoins and bank deposit tokens. That is a map of tradeoffs rather than a declaration that one form wins.

RBA Assistant Governor Brad Jones gave the key nuance in a March speech: wholesale CBDC could be helpful, but it was far from essential for tokenized markets to get started.

He pointed instead to tools such as RITS synchronization, fast payment rails, and existing central bank infrastructure as nearer-term paths.

Acacia therefore sits outside the familiar CBDC argument. The experiment shows early tokenized markets can start with existing settlement tools, while the case for wCBDC grows if those markets become systemically important or need risk-free settlement with functionality existing reserves cannot provide.

Interoperability decides whether liquidity fragments

The settlement problem is also a market-design problem.

If one platform settles in a bank deposit token, another in a stablecoin, and a third through central bank accounts, participants need a way to move between those forms at par and with predictable legal treatment.

Otherwise, liquidity splits across money silos, and each venue asks traders or institutions to pre-position funds before they know where the trade will happen.

That is why the money form changes the power structure. Central bank settlement balances preserve the role of regulated settlement-account holders. Deposit tokens extend bank money into tokenized markets but require banks to agree on standards.

Stablecoins add private competition but bring reserve, redemption, and regulatory questions. A wholesale CBDC could provide a risk-free settlement asset with programmable features, but it also puts the central bank closer to market infrastructure design.

Project Acacia’s pilot boundary is important. The trials were supported by ASIC regulatory relief, which means the activity should be treated as constrained testing, rather than broad commercial authorization for tokenized settlement.

Separately, ASIC’s 2025 stablecoin relief for distributors of an Australian stablecoin shows that stablecoin issuance, distribution, and related intermediary services remain tied to a licensing perimeter that is still being clarified.

That is the tension for policymakers. Tokenized markets need room to test live value, but settlement systems are not apps that can fail without consequence.

Once settlement money becomes part of institutional market infrastructure, questions about access, redemption, legal finality, and financial stability move from background issues to launch conditions.