Project Acacia: Settlement Money Is Tokenization's Real…

Australia's Reserve Bank and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre have published findings from Project Acacia, a wholesale experiment that tested 20 tokenized asset market use cases — spanning fixed income, repos, managed funds, carbon credits, and trade payables. The headline result isn't about the asset wrapper; it's about the cash leg. Institutions need finality, legal certainty, liquidity, and operational reliability simultaneously, and the settlement asset determines whether tokenized rails can carry real volume.

Project Acacia put four candidates head-to-head: traditional RBA exchange settlement account balances, a pilot wholesale CBDC, tokenized commercial bank deposits, and stablecoins. Each solves something and blocks something else.