Australia’s central bank has made one of its most definitive statements yet on digital finance.
In a speech on Tuesday, Reserve Bank of Australia Assistant Governor Brad Jones said the question was no longer whether tokenization had a future in Australia’s financial system, but how it would be implemented, a notable shift from the cautious, exploratory language the RBA has used in previous years.
The announcement followed the conclusion of Project Acacia, a joint research programme between the RBA and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC).
In his speech, titled “After Acacia: The Next Era of Financial System Innovation?”Jones said the findings demonstrated the potential for tokenized money and assets to “reduce risk while unlocking greater efficiency and functionality” in Australia’s wholesale markets.
From Pilots to a Permanent Sandbox
The centrepiece of the RBA’s next phase is a long-term digital market infrastructure testing environment.
The RBA said it would work with other regulators and industry on a new digital market infrastructure sandbox to test tokenized assets, tokenized money, and settlement systems in a longer-term environment designed to support commercialization, rather than short-term pilot programs.
This marks a shift from short-term pilots toward a longer-term environment where industry can progress tokenized finance toward commercialization.
The timeline is still being worked out, with the RBA sequencing the sandbox’s launch after the government completes its review of existing sandbox arrangements.
The sandbox will provide a stage-gated setting for testing tokenized assets, money, and settlement systems.
Alongside it, regulators and industry members will form a joint tokenisation advisory group, while an expanded Deposit Token Working Group will focus on interoperability between deposit tokens issued by different banks.
$24 Billion Economic Opportunity
The economic case underpinning the push is substantial.
The RBA estimated the economic benefit to Australia could reach about $24 billion (US$16.6 billion) per year, a figure drawn from DFCRC research that also noted gains could be “larger still” if entirely new markets emerged as a result.
That figure builds on earlier RBA estimates from 2023 that projected $1–4 billion in annual transaction cost savings from tighter bid-ask spreads, atomic settlement, lower collateral requirements, and reduced costs from failed settlements.
Jones did not treat those numbers as guaranteed.
He acknowledged that tokenization raises issues requiring scrutiny, but argued the evidence base had crossed a threshold demanding active engagement rather than continued caution.
What Project Acacia Found
Project Acacia explored how different forms of digital money and associated infrastructure could support wholesale tokenised asset markets in Australia.
The consultation paper initiating it was released in November 2024.
The project tested 24 use cases involving real money and real asset transactions across a diverse range of participants from local fintechs to three of Australia’s four major banks: CBA, ANZ, and Westpac.
Jones noted that fixed-income markets showed the strongest industry interest, a pattern consistent with what the RBA has observed internationally, where tokenized money market funds and repo have led the adoption curve particularly in the United States.
The project also built on the RBA’s 2023 CBDC pilot, which explored tokenizing carbon credits, debt securities, and supplier invoices using a digital Australian dollar.
ASIC provided regulatory relief to enable testing.
Regulators Coordinating on Legal Framework
The sandbox is only part of the picture.
The RBA is working with ASIC and the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) to jointly design a regulatory framework covering the legal definition of tokenized assets, settlement structures, and platform licensing standards.
The central bank also confirmed it is coordinating with other agencies on how tokenized assets are classified, how settlement finality works, and how new platforms would be licensed and supervised.
Industry participants say regulatory coordination is the critical step needed to move tokenized assets from pilot programmes into real markets.
BTC Markets, a digital asset exchange, told Decrypt that “the RBA’s decision to move from exploratory pilots to a longer-term, stage-gated sandbox environment signals genuine institutional commitment to making tokenized finance work in Australia, not just studying it.”
Three Barriers Holding Australia Back
Jones did not shy away from why Australia has lagged despite its strong fintech ecosystem.
He identified three systemic barriers: a lack of competitive tension reflecting entrenched network effects; risk aversion, partly reflecting perceived legal and regulatory uncertainty; and coordination failures.
The sandbox and the new advisory group are partly designed to address all three giving firms a lower-risk environment to experiment, while bringing regulators and industry into the same room to tackle legal ambiguity together.
The Global Race
The urgency is not purely domestic.
Jones referenced Clearstream’s launch of a tokenized securities platform, Nasdaq’s equity token design for issuers, and Broadridge’s distributed ledger repo platform achieving 457% year-over-year growth in February 2026 as evidence that major international venues are moving rapidly.
Just last week, the SEC approved Nasdaq’s plan to settle Russell 1000 stocks as tokenized securities, and the NYSE signed an MOU with Securitize naming it the first digital transfer agent for its upcoming 24/7 Digital Trading Platform.
Singapore’s MAS is also running the BLOOM initiative for tokenized settlement assets.
Tokenized repo markets in the United States already process around $400 billion in daily transactions, a benchmark that illustrates how far some jurisdictions have already advanced.
Jones signalled that if Australia’s wholesale markets remain anchored to legacy infrastructure while competitors modernize, the country risks losing capital flows and financial services activity to more innovative jurisdictions.
What Comes Next
Changes are also underway on the legislative front.
The Australian Parliament is advancing a regulatory proposal that would require financial services licenses for virtual-asset platforms and custody services.
The industry sees this as a key catalyst that could accelerate institutional investors’ entry into tokenized markets.
The central bank also said it will review exchange settlement account access rules after payment service provider licensing reforms pass parliament.
The RBA’s position is now clear: tokenization is coming to Australia’s financial system.
The sandbox is the mechanism for making sure it arrives in a controlled, commercially viable way rather than by accident or by being left behind.
