CBDC dabblers stretch their luck

Ian Rogers

Project Acacia has today reached a milestone with a number of industry participants selected to explore how innovations in digital money and existing settlement infrastructure might support the development of Australian wholesale tokenised asset markets.

Project Acacia is a joint initiative between the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre.

It is intended to explore use cases for some version of a central bank digital currency.

The RBA and DFCRC said 24 “innovative use cases from a diverse range of organisations, ranging from local fintechs to major banks, have been conditionally selected for this next stage of the project.”

There will be:

•    19 pilot use cases, which will involve real money and real asset transactions, and
•    5 proof-of-concept use cases involving simulated transactions.

The use cases involve a range of asset classes, including fixed income, private markets, trade receivables and carbon credits.

Proposed settlement assets for the use cases include stablecoins, bank deposit tokens, and pilot wholesale central bank digital currency, as well as “new ways of using banks’ existing exchange settlement accounts at the RBA.”

Issuance of pilot wholesale CBDC for testing use cases will occur on a range of private and public-permissioned DLT platforms, including Hedera, Redbelly Network, R3 Corda, Canvas Connect and other EVM-compatible networks.

The initial participants are:

•    Australian Bond Exchange
•    Australia and New Zealand Banking Corporation
•    Australian Payments Plus
•    Canvas
•    Catena Digital
•    Commonwealth Bank of Australia
•    Fireblocks
•    Forte Tech Solutions
•    Imperium Markets
•    Northern Trust
•    NotCentralised
•    ProspEx Group
•    Westpac Banking Corporation
•    Zerocap

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