RBA Launches Six-Month CBDC Digital Currency Trial
Australia’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), has launched a six-month digital currency trial under Project Acacia Phase Two. The trial will test CBDC settlement and tokenization across 24 live and simulated use cases.
Major banks ANZ, Commonwealth Bank and Westpac, along with fintech startups, will trial stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits and a wholesale central bank digital currency for fixed-income trading, private markets, trade receivables and carbon credits. Nineteen tests will use actual funds; five will simulate transactions.
The pilot operates on distributed ledgers including Hedera, Red Belly Network, R3 Corda and EVM-compatible platforms like Ethereum. ASIC has granted regulatory exemptions for out-of-framework digital asset transactions.
Findings, due in Q1 2026, will guide Australia’s federal digital asset strategy and shape future CBDC design. This digital currency trial underscores the growing role of tokenization and CBDC settlement in boosting efficiency and resilience in wholesale financial markets.
Neutral
Project Acacia’s Phase Two digital currency trial is a regulatory sandbox initiative focusing on CBDC settlement and tokenized assets in Australia’s wholesale financial markets. In the short term, it uses pilot tokens and stablecoins within a controlled environment, so it is unlikely to directly impact the prices of mainstream cryptocurrencies such as ETH or HBAR. Over the long term, successful CBDC and tokenization pilots could validate distributed ledger use cases and support demand for underlying blockchain infrastructure tokens. However, these effects are indirect and may not lead to immediate price movements. Therefore, the overall market impact is assessed as neutral.