The Reserve Bank of Australia has indicated that tokenization is moving from a speculative idea to a practical policy agenda, saying the debate is no longer about whether asset and money tokenization has a future in Australia, but about how it should be implemented. In a speech in Sydney on March 25, 2026, Deputy Governor Brad Jones said the RBA’s Project Acacia had convinced policymakers that tokenized assets, combined with better market infrastructure and payments improvements, could improve efficiency, reduce risk and support wholesale markets more broadly.
The central bank also quantified the upside potential. Jones said an analysis published by the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Center estimates that tokenization could generate around AUD24 billion in efficiency gains per year for the Australian economy, with this figure increasing further if new markets and second-round effects are taken into account. This estimate has helped move the debate away from theory and implementation, with the RBA saying there is now enough evidence to step up work on how these benefits could actually be realized in a stable and orderly way.
The Acacia Project was designed to test exactly that. The initiative brought together banks, customs, fintechs, market infrastructure operators, fund managers, stablecoin issuers and technology providers to explore 20 different use cases across a range of assets, from government and corporate bonds to term deposits, investment funds, commercial debt and mining royalties. Settlement in the project used both private money and central bank currency, including stablecoins, bank deposit tokens, wholesale CBDCs and exchange settlement account balances, giving the RBA the opportunity to see how different settlement models might work in practice.
Tokenization is gaining momentum
One of the key takeaways from the speech is that private money is unlikely to turn into a real fight for dominance. Instead, Jones suggested that stablecoins and bank deposit tokens could end up serving different purposes, with stablecoins being better suited to smaller, newer tokenized markets and bank deposit tokens likely finding a larger role in larger, more established markets. He linked this view to the different trust and scalability characteristics of the two instruments, noting that bank deposit tokens can build on the existing prudential framework and central bank support already surrounding bank deposits.
The RBA’s stance on wholesale CBDCs was more cautious, but still open. Jones said the industry views a wholesale central bank digital currency as potentially useful, but far from essential to starting tokenized markets. He added that if tokenized markets ultimately become systemically important, the case for a wholesale CBDC would strengthen from a financial stability perspective. For now, however, the message was that Australia did not need to wait for a wholesale CBDC before making significant progress on token funding.
Rather than betting everything on a single solution, the RBA is preparing broader action. Jones said the central bank would work with other agencies in the Council of Financial Regulators, the DFCRC and industry on a range of initiatives to support responsible innovation. A key part of this effort will be exploring a new digital financial market infrastructure sandbox, which would give policymakers and industry a controlled environment to test and scale tokenized money, assets and infrastructure over a longer-term, staged process. The RBA also wants to use Acacia’s experience to inform future work on settlement infrastructure and payments interoperability.
The speech suggests that Australia is entering a phase where tokenization is treated less as a futuristic concept and more as a systems design problem. The RBA does not state that technology is a definitive answer and is clearly wary of the legal, technical and coordination challenges. But the general direction is unequivocal: token markets are no longer asked to prove that they deserve their place in the financial system. The real question now is how quickly the country can build the rails to support them.
