AI Summary
- The Reserve Bank of Australia’s final Project Acacia report (PDF) doesn’t just feature the XRP Ledger as one of the public DLT platforms.
- It does something more interesting: Australia’s central bank just tested Ripple’s full stack XRPL + RLUSD — on an Australian Government bond.
- This is a much bigger story than “central bank used XRP Ledger”.
- The use case explored primary issuance and secondary trading and redemption using a central limit order book combined with an automated market maker, with settlement in RLUSD stablecoin.” Project Acacia Final Report, p.61 The DLT network: XRP Ledger.
Days ago, we covered how Hedera ended up in four of the seven Project Acacia use cases. Today we look at the other side of the same report the one most of the XRP community probably missed.
The Reserve Bank of Australia’s final Project Acacia report (PDF) doesn’t just feature the XRP Ledger as one of the public DLT platforms. It does something more interesting:
Australia’s central bank just tested Ripple’s full stack XRPL + RLUSD — on an Australian Government bond.
Custody via JPMorgan. Ripple Labs in the room. Chainlink and Fireblocks on the same use case. This is a much bigger story than “central bank used XRP Ledger”.
XRP Was Used By The Central Bank Of Australia In Project Acacia! New Report Just Dropped…
The Zerocap use case (page 61)
The pilot was led by Zerocap, an Australian-regulated digital asset infrastructure firm. Here’s what they ran, in the RBA’s own words:
“Zerocap piloted the end-to-end lifecycle of an Australian Government bond tokenised as a digital twin issued onto a public-permissioned network. The use case explored primary issuance and secondary trading and redemption using a central limit order book combined with an automated market maker, with settlement in RLUSD stablecoin.”
The DLT network: XRP Ledger.
Two things in that paragraph absolutely matter.
1. RLUSD as the settlement asset
RLUSD is Ripple’s USD-backed stablecoin. By selecting it as the settlement asset for a tokenized Australian Government bond pilot, the RBA effectively gave a central-bank-tier sanity check to Ripple’s full institutional stack issuance on XRPL, trading via AMM + CLOB, settlement in RLUSD.
This is the first time we’ve seen RLUSD positioned alongside government debt in a regulator-led experiment of this scale. That’s a different category of legitimacy from exchange listings or DeFi partnerships.
2. CLOB + AMM hybrid market structure
The pilot combined a central limit order book (traditional market microstructure) with an automated market maker (DeFi primitive). The RBA explicitly highlighted this on page 17 as a key example of what tokenized markets can do that legacy rails cannot:
“This makes assets and funds immediately available for reuse, and is how automated market makers (AMMs) or on-chain limit order books operate as decentralised exchanges on DLT systems — as demonstrated in the Zerocap use case.”
The XRP Ledger has native CLOB and native AMM functionality. That’s exactly the combination this pilot tested at central-bank scale.
Who else was in the room
The collaborating parties on this single Zerocap use case (page 61):
- Bano Pty Ltd FX
- BGC Brokers LP — the bond was held in custody via the broker at JPMorgan
- Chainlink Labs Pte Ltd
- Fireblocks Ltd
- Ripple Labs Inc
- Stormrake Pty Ltd
- VBS Exchange Pty Ltd
Three things to notice:
JPMorgan custody. The bond at the heart of the pilot was custodied via a broker at JPMorgan. JPMorgan doesn’t show up in experimental crypto pilots they were here.
Ripple Labs Inc., not just XRPL. Ripple itself was a named collaborating party, not just the network in the background. That means Ripple was directly involved in operating or supporting the pilot infrastructure.
Chainlink + Fireblocks alongside Ripple. Three of the largest institutional crypto infrastructure brands working on the same Australian central bank pilot. This is the kind of stack regulators want to see multiple specialized layers, professional custody, real institutional brokers.
Where XRPL sits on the decentralization spectrum (page 22)
The RBA also published their analysis of how decentralized each platform actually is:
“Ethereum (used by ProspEx and Forte) has thousands of nodes and XRP Ledger (used by Zerocap) has hundreds while Hedera (Imperium Markets and AP+) and Redbelly (used by ABE, Macropod, Fireblocks and NotCentralised) were less decentralised.”
XRPL lands in the middle of the spectrum — fewer nodes than Ethereum but materially more than Hedera or Redbelly. That positioning matters: decentralized enough to meet public-network expectations, predictable enough for institutional finality and compliance use cases.
The market size the RBA is preparing for
This pilot isn’t happening in a vacuum. The RBA explicitly cites the macro framing in their introduction:
- US$30 trillion projected tokenized real-world asset value by the mid-2030s (page 4)
- US$110 trillion global bond market size, the asset class most likely to benefit from tokenization (page 9)
- Over 80% of tokenized asset value today is concentrated in fixed-income private credit and US Treasuries (page 4)
And the economic gain estimate specific to Australia (page 19):
“Research by the DFCRC estimates that the adoption of tokenisation could deliver approximately A$24 billion per annum in economic gains across three broad channels: ‘better markets’ (A$10 billion per annum), ‘better payments’ (A$8 billion per annum), and ‘better assets’ (A$6 billion per annum).”
And specifically for fixed-income markets the asset class Zerocap’s XRPL pilot directly addressed:
“The DFCRC estimated that the potential economic gains in fixed-income markets amount to A$2 billion per annum, driven by more efficient post-trade processing and asset servicing, improved collateral utilisation and reduced costs associated with mitigating settlement failures.”
That A$2 billion is the size of the prize Zerocap’s pilot was built to capture.
Why this matters for XRP and Ripple
1. RLUSD just got its first central-bank-tier validation. Stablecoins live and die by the institutions willing to settle real value in them. The RBA selecting RLUSD for a sovereign bond pilot is a far stronger signal than any exchange listing or partnership announcement could be.
2. XRPL was chosen for its specific strengths, not its hype. The pilot tested CLOB + AMM trading and atomic settlement features that XRPL has natively. The RBA wasn’t picking platforms by ticker price. They picked them by what worked for the use case.
3. Ripple is now in the same room as JPMorgan and Chainlink for sovereign debt. The list of collaborating parties on that single pilot is essentially the institutional crypto Avengers: Ripple, Chainlink, Fireblocks, JPMorgan custody, regulated Australian brokers. This is the consortium structure that future tokenized sovereign debt programs will actually be built on.
Bigger picture
Project Acacia is a single national pilot. But it sits inside a global wave of central bank tokenization initiatives — Project Agorá at the BIS, the ECB’s wholesale CBDC track, the UK’s digital gilt pilot, Singapore’s Project Guardian, and others.
What used to be theoretical is now being piloted at sovereign debt scale by the people who actually issue money. Two days ago the story was Hedera. Today it’s XRP and RLUSD. Tomorrow it will be another network. But Project Acacia made one thing concrete: Ripple’s full stack passed the central-bank-grade smoke test.
That’s the headline most crypto Twitter feeds missed.
Source
Reserve Bank of Australia Project Acacia: Exploring the Role of Digital Money in Wholesale Tokenised Asset Markets — Final Report (PDF, 70 pages, May 2026). Zerocap use case detailed on pages 61–62; macro framing on pages 4 and 9; economic gain estimates in Box B, page 19.
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