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But the Reserve Bank of Australia has signalled that tokenization is moving from a “speculative idea” to ‘practical policy agenda’, saying “The debate now does not have an outcome on whether asset and money tokenisation will be in Australia or what it should be done with”. Assistant Governor Brad Jones, speaking in Sydney on 25 March 2026, said the RBA’s Project Acacia had persuaded policymakers that tokenized assets – combined with better market infrastructure and payments upgrades – could improve efficiency, reduce risk and support the wholesale markets more widely.
Also, the central bank also imposed hard no.1 on the potential upsider. In a study published by the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, Jones said ‘Totalization could deliver about 24 billion – one year in efficiency gains for the Australian economy with the figure rising further if new markets and second-round effects are added to the list. This is a way that that estimate has diverted the discussion from theory and toward implementation, with the RBA saying there is now enough evidence to intensify work on how those benefits could be achieved in ‘an efficient and stable manner of execution’.
Project Acacia was designed to test exactly that, as it tested with Project Aacian. It gathered banks, custodians, fintechans and market infrastructure operators (fund managers, stablecoin issuers) and technology providers to explore 20 different use cases across all sectors of assets from government and corporate bonds to term deposits, investment funds, trade payables and mining royalties. In the project, settlement used both private money and central bank money (including stablecoins), bank deposit tokens, wholesale CBDC or exchange settlement account balances) to give the RBA a chance to see how different settlement models might work in practice.
Tokenization Gains Momentum
Amongst the speech’s most important takeaways was that private money will probably not be an aggressive battle for dominance. In contrast, Jones argued that stablecoins and bank deposit tokens may serve other applications; stable coin is better for smaller, newer tokenized markets (and bank deposits) likely to find the stronger role in bigger larger, more established ones. His interpretation of this view is based on the trust and scaling characteristics of both instruments, noting that bank deposit tokens can be constructed in the existing prudential framework and central bank support already associated with bank deposits.
RBA’s position on wholesale CBDC was more cautious, but still open to the public. Jones said the industry saw a “very useful” wholesale central bank digital currency as possible, but far from essential for tokenized markets to begin their initial start-up. He said that “if tokenized markets eventually became systemically important, the case for a wholesale CBDC would strengthen on an economic stability point of view.” The message was for the time, however, that Australia does not need a wholesale CBDC before making meaningful progress on tokenized finance.
The RBA, rather than betray everything on one solution, is preparing for a larger push. The central bank is collaborating with other Council of Financial Regulators agencies, the DFCRC and industry on a series of projects to support responsible innovation,” Jones said. But a major part of that effort is to explore ‘an emerging digital financial market infrastructure (sandbox) model, which will give policymakers and industry enclaved environment for testing and scale tokenized money, assets and infrastructure over – an extended term, stage-gated process. Also, the RBA wants to use the experience from Acacia for future work on settlement infrastructure and payments interoperability.
Speaking at the time, it says Australia is entering a stage where tokenization is being treated less like ‘future-theist concept and more like systems design problem’ as an ongoing phase of development. The technology is clearly a warning of legal, technical and coordination challenges that the RBA cannot say as ‘complete answer’. That’s the broad direction, but it is unmistakable tokenized markets are no longer being asked to prove they belong in financial system. It is now a real question how quickly can the country build the rails to support them.
Thanks for reading Australia’s RBA Sees Big Upside in Tokenization Launches Digital Infrastructure Sandbox
