Read the full case study here.
When an investor buys a bond, the trade itself can happen in seconds. But the actual moment when the money and assets change hands (the settlement) can take two or three days. This delay is a structural feature of how wholesale financial markets work. Trades pass through clearing houses, custodians, and bank ledgers, all of which need to reconcile their records before the deal is final. Across the global financial system, these inefficiencies add up to significant costs and risks.
Tokenization promises to fix this. When assets and money are represented as digital tokens on programmable platforms, settlement can be atomic: both sides of a trade happen simultaneously, or not at all. There is no waiting, no failed settlements, and no capital sitting idle.
The trouble is, two very different forms of digital money are emerging in parallel, and they are not built to work together.
The same openness that makes stablecoins useful creates problems for a CBDC, where central banks need tight oversight, known participants, and the ability to enforce compliance at every step. Without a way to bridge these two worlds, the promise of tokenized markets stays theoretical.
In late 2024, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) launched a collaborative research initiative called Project Acacia. The goal was to explore how different forms of digital money, paired with new infrastructure, could support the development of wholesale tokenized asset markets in Australia.
With backing from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), and the Australian Treasury, Project Acacia eventually selected 20 use cases from organizations ranging from local fintechs to three of Australia’s four major banks. ASIC provided targeted regulatory relief to enable participants to test tokenized settlement within the project's controlled scope.
As an operator of national payments infrastructure with deep expertise in how regulated financial systems actually work, Australian Payments Plus (AP+) was a natural participant. AP+ operates the core domestic payments infrastructure that Australians use every day, including a debit card network, a bill payment system, and a real-time payments platform. It partners with more than 150 institutions across the country, including banks, retailers, fintechs, and government agencies.
Within Project Acacia, AP+ designed and built a token interchange intended to serve as national infrastructure, capable of accepting any payment token and facilitating exchanges with tokenized assets.
The RBA issued a pilot wholesale CBDC for research purposes, on the condition that the CBDC did not sit on a public ledger. The marketplaces and stablecoin rails involved in the project all operated on public networks; that was the point of broad accessibility. But the CBDC had to remain in a controlled, private environment under central bank oversight. For a token interchange whose entire purpose was to bridge public marketplaces, this was an interesting hurdle.
AP+’s solution was a three-part architecture:
With the plan in place, AP+’s team needed distributed ledger technology that could support both halves of the architecture. The answer was a paired solution.
For Project Acacia, AP+ would deploy Hedera Mainnet for the token interchange and HashSphere to host the wholesale CBDC.
What made this pairing work was that both Hedera and HashSphere are built on the same tech stack, Hiero. Hiero is the open source distributed ledger codebase governed by LF Decentralized Trust. In 2024, the full Hedera codebase was contributed to LF Decentralized Trust, where it became Hiero: an openly governed, vendor-neutral technology stack. It was the first time a major public blockchain had placed its full codebase under independent, neutral governance.
Hiero made the hybrid architecture possible, not just convenient. Without a shared, open source code foundation that both public and private networks could be built from, AP+ would have faced the same interoperability problem the project was designed to solve.
AP+ worked closely with the Hashgraph team to stand up the HashSphere private network and ensure it connected properly to the public Hedera Mainnet. The private instance had to support the central bank's CBDC minting, manage institutional wallets, and communicate with the public-side interchange layer.
The architecture was not theoretical. AP+ ran live transactions with institutional counterparties using real money. The improvement was stark: from two to three days to minutes. And unlike conventional settlement, the atomic swap meant that both sides of the trade settled simultaneously. If anything was wrong — an insufficient balance, a mismatched ID, an account that didn't look right — the whole deal was off.
Project Acacia wrapped at the end of 2025. The pilot and proof-of-concept use cases were completed and wholesale CBDC was deployed onto multiple platforms. Then, in March 2026, the results came in.
The DFCRC published independent research titled “Unlocking Australia’s $24 Billion Digital Finance Opportunity,” quantifying the potential economic gains from tokenizing wholesale markets. The savings, drawn from reduced settlement times, lower collateral requirements, fewer failed trades, and tighter bid-ask spreads, were estimated at $24 billion per year, approximately 1% of Australia’s GDP.
On 25 March 2026, speaking at AP+’s own Beyond Tomorrow summit in Sydney, RBA Assistant Governor Brad Jones delivered a speech titled “After Acacia: The Next Era of Financial System Innovation?” His message was unequivocal. The RBA, he said, no longer sees the main question as whether tokenization has a future in Australia’s financial system, but rather, how.
Project Acacia, in other words, is not an ending. It was a body of evidence that contributed to broader consideration of how tokenized settlement infrastructure could operate in Australia's wholesale financial markets. And the token interchange AP+ built on Hedera and HashSphere, grounded in the Hiero codebase under LF Decentralized Trust, demonstrated the viability of the architecture at pilot scale.
The LF Decentralized Trust team worked with AP+ and Hashgraph to document the architecture and the role of Hiero in this hybrid model to help share these insights with the broader community.
Read the full case study here.