Australia's Central Bank to Explore Developing Wholesale Tokenized Asset Markets

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) will explore the development of wholesale tokenized asset markets alongside an array of industry participants.

"Project Acacia" will use stablecoins, pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) and bank deposit tokens in 24 use cases of tokenizing a range of asset classes, such as fixed income and private markets.

Tokenization refers to the process of minting assets such as bonds and equities as tokens that can be bought, sold and traded on blockchains, with the aim of making processes faster, cheaper and more transparent.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is also providing regulatory relief in order to streamline the pilot, which will involve the testing of tokenized asset transaction between participants and other selected financial institutions, the RBA announced on Thursday.

Issuance of pilot wholesale CBDC for testing the use cases will take place on different blockchain platforms, such as Hedera and R3 Corda.

Participants in Project Acacia include Fireblocks, Northern Trust (NTRS) and Australian banks Commonwealth Bank, Australia and New Zealand Banking Corporation (ANZ) and Westpac.

The project is the a sign of the Australian government's plans to integrate digital assets into its economy being put into practise.

The Australian Treasury published a whitepaper in March, describing how the government planned to embrace tokenization, real-world assets and wholesale CBDCs to make financial markets more efficient.