If and when there is any progress to a central bank digital currency in Australia, the use case or use cases will be “in a wholesale sense”, Michele Bullock, governor of the Reserve Bank told Senate Estimates yesterday.

“That’s where we are going at the moment; trying to stand that up … in the atomic settlement of assets.”

In August last year, the Reserve Bank gave qualified support for the introduction of a CBDC in Australia, following completion of a pilot involving numerous CBDC use cases earlier this year.

The RBA and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre worked together on the project, and at the time released a report on the pilot, saying “a CBDC has the potential to support increased efficiency and resilience in some areas of the payments system, though more research is required”.

Since then the RBA has been all but mute on the topic, perhaps encouraging the idea that the RBA interest in both the merits and the priority of this work may be waning.

Bullock has effectively ruled out any retail or mass market use case for a CBDC in Australia.

This places the RBA in a starkly contrasting position to New Zealand, where the RBNZ is (bizarrely) gung ho for a retail CBDC, styled digital cash, potentially around 2030.

Last August, the RBA said that itself and the Treasury were working towards publishing a joint report around the middle of this year that will provide a stocktake on digital money research in Australia and set out a roadmap for future work.