AI Summary
- The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has just published the final report of Project Acacia (PDF) an experimental research initiative exploring how digital money and tokenized asset markets could reshape Australia’s wholesale financial system.
- Project Acacia is the RBA’s flagship experimental program for testing how DLTs, wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC), and asset tokenization could improve Australia’s financial markets.
- The shortlisted networks were Canvas Connect, Ethereum, Hedera (both public and private), RedBelly, and the XRP Ledger.
- Reserve Bank of Australia — Project Acacia: Exploring the Role of Digital Money in Wholesale Tokenised Asset Markets — Final Report (PDF, 70 pages).
For years, anyone suggesting that central banks would one day embrace distributed ledger technology was waved off as dreaming. Today, that prediction looks less and less far-fetched.
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has just published the final report of Project Acacia (PDF) an experimental research initiative exploring how digital money and tokenized asset markets could reshape Australia’s wholesale financial system.
And buried inside the 70-page document is the part most of the crypto industry will skim past, but that matters enormously: Hedera is one of the most-used DLT platforms in the pilot. Four use cases ran on Hedera, tied with RedBelly for the most among any blockchain in the program.
This is the future we’ve been writing about for years on our Hedera hub starting to become institutional reality.
Hedera Hashgraph HBAR Is Being Tested Right Now By Central Banks! Project Acacia Findings…
What Project Acacia is
Project Acacia is the RBA’s flagship experimental program for testing how DLTs, wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC), and asset tokenization could improve Australia’s financial markets.
The initiative was co-led by the RBA and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), and supported by:
- The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC)
- The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA)
- The Australian Treasury
It brought together domestic and international banks, fintechs, custodians, payment system operators, fund managers, financial market infrastructure providers, exchanges, stablecoin issuers, and technology providers in other words, the entire institutional financial stack.
The total value piloted across all wholesale CBDC experiments came to AUD 4.4 million, with individual transactions of up to AUD 250,000.
What the RBA actually said
The clearest signal on where this is heading came from RBA Assistant Governor Brad Jones, who summarized the final report’s key takeaways:
“Project Acacia showed us that there is significant and growing industry interest in tokenisation. What really got the attention of industry and regulators was the potential for tokenised markets to make issuance, trading, and settlement more efficient, to enhance the ability of assets to move around our financial system, potential improvements for issuers and investors to access liquidity, and to enjoy reductions in settlement risk.”
He went further:
“The Reserve Bank, the Digital Finance CRC, and our partner Council of Financial Regulator agencies will build on the momentum generated by Project Acacia by embarking on a new suite of initiatives. The focus will be on addressing some of the coordination challenges that have stymied responsible innovation in the past, and to explore better pathways for industry to safely experiment and then scale new innovations in tokenised finance.”
Translation: Project Acacia isn’t a one-off. It’s the foundation of a multi-year program.
Where Hedera fits page by page
On page 15 of the report, the RBA lists the DLT platforms used across pilots. The shortlisted networks were Canvas Connect, Ethereum, Hedera (both public and private), RedBelly, and the XRP Ledger.
Of the use cases mapped in the project landscape figure, four ran on Hedera — tied with RedBelly as the most-used DLT in the program. Every other platform was used substantially less.
Australian Payment Plus and Hash Fair (page 16)
Page 16 details the three short-listed DLT platforms used for wCBDC experimentation:
- Australian Payment Plus (AP+) Hash Fair instance a private Hedera-based ledger
- Canvas Connect a purpose-built blockchain for tokenization
- RedBelly
AP+, the body behind major Australian payments rails, chose to anchor its wCBDC pilot on a private Hedera ledger. That’s a significant choice given AP+ is responsible for systems like NPP (New Payments Platform) that handle real-time consumer payments across Australia.
Decentralization analysis (page 22)
Page 22 contains the RBA’s analysis of decentralization properties of each platform. The report notes that Ethereum has thousands of nodes, the XRP Ledger has hundreds, while “Hedera, Imperium Market, AP+ and RedBelly used by these individuals were less decentralized.”
This is consistent with Hedera’s design a council-governed network optimized for enterprise predictability over maximal decentralization. The RBA explicitly recognized that “private chains including ANZ, Canvas and Hash Fair (Hedera) utilized few nodes for redundancy” appropriate for the institutional contexts where they were used.
AP+ public Hedera interchange service (page 61)
On page 61, the report describes one of the most technically interesting pilots:
“AP+ piloted an interchange service built on public networks which facilitated the exchange of different forms of privately issued tokenized money (e.g. stablecoins or deposit tokens) using rules captured in smart contracts. A digital twin of wCBDC, referred to as ‘whitecoins’, served as the interchange asset on the public network, while the underlying wCBDC resided on a private network.”
The DLT networks listed: public permissioned Hedera and private permissioned Hedera Hashgraph.
AP+ used Hedera on both sides of the bridge public network for cross-platform interoperability of tokenized money, private network for the underlying wholesale CBDC. It’s exactly the kind of hybrid architecture that central banks need.
Imperium Markets, NAB, Westpac, Bank of Queensland (page 63)
Page 63 describes the Imperium Markets use case in detail:
“Imperium Markets piloted three use cases that explored the issuance and trading of different types of tokenized short-term wholesale money market instruments term deposits, negotiable certificates of deposit and annuities. Using the Imperium marketplace, the asset tokens were digital twins of the underlying asset. In each use case, the tokenized instruments were recorded, custodied, and exchanged on chain on a public permissioned distributed ledger, with settlement executed using a Cascal-issued pilot stablecoin issued on the same public permissioned ledger and backed by wCBDCs issued on a private ledger.”
The DLT network: Hedera and Hedera Hashgraph.
The institutional roster on this single use case is striking:
- Australian Payments Plus
- Australian Super
- Cascal Limited
- Bank of Queensland
- Challenger Limited
- Colonial First State
- National Australia Bank (NAB)
- Westpac
These aren’t experimental fintechs. This is Australia’s banking establishment piloting tokenized money market instruments — term deposits, negotiable certificates of deposit, annuities — on a Hedera-based settlement infrastructure.
Why this matters
Three things to take from the final report:
1. Central bank conviction is firming up. The RBA isn’t just exploring tokenization — they’re explicitly committing to a follow-on program with APRA, ASIC, and the Treasury. Project Acacia’s findings will guide that work.
2. Hedera is institutional-grade infrastructure now. Being chosen for four of the most institutionally significant pilots — by AP+, Imperium Markets, and the country’s biggest banks — is not a marketing win. It’s an architecture win. These institutions chose Hedera because of its governance model, predictable performance, and enterprise tooling.
3. The “internet of value” stack is starting to crystallize. Wholesale CBDC on private ledgers, stablecoin interchange on public DLTs, tokenized real-world assets settling on hybrid infrastructure. Project Acacia is one of the clearest blueprints yet of what regulated digital money will actually look like.
And it’s not just Australia. Similar projects are running at the European Central Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, and across other central banks moving into tokenization. What used to be theoretical is now being piloted by the people who actually issue money.
For Hedera holders and watchers, this report is one of the strongest institutional validation signals we’ve seen all year.
We’ll be covering the Ripple-related parts of Project Acacia in a follow-up piece — but for tonight, the takeaway is simple: a major central bank just put Hedera at the center of its tokenization future.
Source
Reserve Bank of Australia — Project Acacia: Exploring the Role of Digital Money in Wholesale Tokenised Asset Markets — Final Report (PDF, 70 pages).
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