RBA Assistant Governor Brad Jones made the position clear in a speech delivered March 25, 2026, telling attendees that Australia's central bank has moved past debating whether digital tokens will reshape financial markets and is now focused entirely on how to build the infrastructure around them. Project Acacia, the RBA's six-month joint research program with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), tested 24 use cases across real-money and proof-of-concept settings. A final report is expected in early Q2 2026.

The economic stakes are substantial. Jones cited RBA analysis projecting annual efficiency gains of up to AUD $24 billion from tokenized wholesale markets, with potential for larger returns if new asset classes emerge. The DFCRC's own estimate, offered by Chief Scientist Prof. Talis Putnins, put the figure at AUD $19 billion per year. Both figures reflect gains across settlement, collateral management, and market structure improvements in fixed income, trade receivables, private markets, carbon credits, investment funds, bank term deposits, and mining royalties.

What the RBA Is Actually Building

Jones announced five concrete next steps coming out of Project Acacia. These include a digital financial market infrastructure sandbox developed with the DFCRC, a review of Exchange Settlement Account access policies, a new Regulator-Industry Tokenisation Advisory Group, a Deposit Token Working Group focused on interoperability between banks, and a C-suite Roundtable on the Digital Finance Future.

The Deposit Token Working Group is particularly significant for developers and institutions building on Australian financial rails. Bank-issued deposit tokens, which represent claims on regulated Authorised Deposit-Taking Institutions (ADIs), will need to move across platforms and institutions without friction. Solving that interoperability problem is now a formal policy priority.

Jones was notably restrained on wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC). The RBA has not abandoned the concept, but Jones framed it as "potentially helpful, but far from essential" in the near term. He said the case for a wholesale CBDC would strengthen only if tokenized markets became systemically important from a financial stability perspective. Australia already ruled out a retail CBDC in September 2024, with Treasury and the RBA finding no clear public interest case for one.

Project Acacia ran across five distributed ledger platforms: Hedera, Redbelly Network, R3 Corda, Canvas Connect, and EVM-compatible networks. The deliberate choice to remain blockchain-agnostic is relevant for builders: the RBA is not picking winners at the infrastructure layer. Major banks including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac, and ANZ participated, alongside fintechs such as Fireblocks and Zerocap. ANZ specifically tested tokenized trade payables settled with wholesale CBDC, partnering with Netwealth, MessageXchange, and RMIT University.

ASIC Commissioner Kate O'Rourke noted that the regulator "sees useful applications for the technologies underlying digital assets in wholesale markets." ASIC issued a specific regulatory relief instrument (F2025L00831) to streamline Project Acacia testing, and the agency updated its guidance in late 2025 to classify stablecoins and wrapped tokens as financial products. Australia has also published draft stablecoin and payments legislation with a government target of 2026 implementation, providing a direct legislative pathway for the regulatory direction Jones outlined.

Regional Implications: India and Africa Are Watching

Australia is the third major Asia-Pacific financial center to move toward a defined regulatory posture on tokenized money. Hong Kong's stablecoin licensing regime became effective in August 2025, and Singapore finalized its Monetary Authority of Singapore stablecoin framework later that same year. Together, these three centers are establishing a regional benchmark that other jurisdictions are beginning to reference.

The RBA's pluralistic stance carries weight well beyond Australia. India presents a direct contrast. The Reserve Bank of India has consistently resisted private stablecoins, pushing instead for its own wholesale e-Rupee pilot and a proposed Unified Markets Interface for tokenized settlements. The Indian government is less uniform: India's Economic Survey 2025 to 2026 signaled openness to regulating stablecoins, while a debt-backed, rupee-pegged token called ARC (developed by Polygon and Indian fintech Anq) had targeted a Q1 2026 launch. That tension between state-controlled and privately-issued tokenized money is precisely what Australia's coexistence model attempts to resolve at a policy level.

For institutions in South Asia and the broader ASEAN region designing domestic regulated stablecoin frameworks, the RBA's Deposit Token Working Group model offers a practical template for how to handle interoperability without choosing between state and private infrastructure.

Africa's situation is different in character. Stablecoins are not a wholesale finance experiment there. According to Chainalysis, stablecoins account for roughly 43% of all crypto transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa, driven by remittances, cross-border payments, and inflation hedging. The AfCFTA Digital Trade Initiative is targeting stablecoin-based settlement to unlock an estimated $70 billion in pan-African trade, with pilots planned in Kenya and Ghana. Kenya's Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill 2025 splits oversight between the Central Bank and the Capital Markets Authority. Uganda has separately launched a permissioned CBDC pilot backed by treasury bonds, offering another example of how African regulators are experimenting with distinct forms of tokenized public money in parallel.

Australia's framing of stablecoins as preserving monetary sovereignty within a regulated system is directly relevant to African regulators worried about USD-stablecoin dominance and the risk of dollarization in domestic economies. The ASIC sandbox model and the RBA's regulatory relief approach are governance tools that can be adapted without wholesale adoption of Australia's specific architecture.

Jones summed up the direction plainly: "A financial system that is more dynamic and resilient to technological disruption is in our national interest. But it will take a Team Australia effort." The final Project Acacia report, due in early Q2 2026, will provide the technical record behind that ambition. What comes next will depend on how quickly the new working groups can turn policy intent into operational standards.