” . Home News Business Financial Services Australia takes another step toward a central bank digital currency By Staff Writer Jul 11 2025 6:06AM Under Project Acacia. Australia’s central bank said on Thursday it was taking another major step toward a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) with a range of industry partners pursuing projects using real money and assets for the first time. The Reserve Bank of Australia said its “Project Acacia” initiative would test 19 pilot cases involving money and assets, along with five proof-of-concept use cases involving simulated transactions. The trials involve a range of asset classes, including fixed income, private markets, trade receivables and carbon credits. Proposed settlement assets include CBDCs, stablecoins and bank deposit tokens, as well as new ways of using commercial banks’ existing deposits at the RBA. The platforms include Hedera, Redbelly, R3 Corda, Canvas Connect and other compatible networks. Testing will occur over the next six months, with a report due in the first half of next year, the RBA said. “The use cases selected in this project will help us to better understand how innovations in central bank and private digital money, alongside payments infrastructure, might help to uplift the functioning of wholesale financial markets in Australia,” said Brad Jones, an RBA assistant governor overseeing the financial system. The RBA is concentrating on wholesale uses for a digital currency, having decided there was no economic benefit in an official retail cryptocurrency. According to the central bank, the benefits of a wholesale CBDC include reducing counterparty and operational risks, freeing up collateral, increasing transparency and auditability and reducing costs for institutions and customers. Got a news tip for our journalists? Share it with us anonymously here. © 2019 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions. Tags: cdbccryptocurrencyfinancial servicessoftware Related Articles CBA using facial recognition logins to verify disputed payments Microsoft racks up over US$500 million in AI savings Nvidia-backed Perplexity launches AI-powered browser AGL taps AI agents in retail transformation Partner Content Partner Content Logicalis APAC CIO Report: The CIO’s 2025 Mandate Partner Content AI Supercharged: How Search is Powering the Future Partner Content ElasticON Sydney 2025: Deriving value from your data with Search AI Partner Content Australian organisations must act on security – or risk AI ambitions falling flat Sponsored Whitepapers Leverage Technologies: Industry-Tailored ERP Implementation for Growth and Compliance Service Over Signatures: The Truth About No Lock-In IT Wasabi Reveals Hidden Costs and Cloud Storage Shifts in ANZ for 2025 Datacom + Microsoft Azure: Turn Ideas Into Impact in Just 4 Weeks Protect APIs. Protect Your Business. Events Tech in Gov 2025 Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Summit APAC 2025 Security Exhibition & Conference 2025 Integrate Expo 2025 Digital As Usual Cybersecurity Roadshow: Brisbane edition . ”
