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.
Alongside these developments, the DFCRC published independent researchThe DFCRC published a report 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. This research highlighted that the figure would be even larger if tokenization enabled entirely new markets to emergeAnd the report noted that the figure would be even larger if tokenization enabled entirely new markets to emerge.
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.
Jones framed the shift in competitive terms. Tokenized asset issuance is accelerating sharply across major financial centers. If Australia’s wholesale markets stay anchored to legacy infrastructure while competitors modernize, the country risks losing capital flows and financial services activity to more innovative jurisdictions.
But for a country, the case is bigger than the numbers. It is about whether a nation can build its own digital financial infrastructure on its own terms, or whether it ends up dependent on foreign platforms and private currencies it cannot control. Every country exploring digital money faces this question. The choices made in pilots and proofs of concept like Project Acacia shape what the answer will look like. The model could work for any country willing to build it.
The RBA announced it will be partnering with other Council of Financial Regulators (CFR) agencies, the DFCRC, and industry in pursuit of an ambitious program of initiatives to support responsible innovation. A focal point for this effort will be the RBA’s exploration with the DFCRC into a new digital financial marketThe RBA announced it will partner with other regulatory agencies, the DFCRC, and industry to explore a new digital financial market infrastructure (DFMI) sandbox: a controlled environment for testing and scaling tokenized money, assets, and new infrastructure over a longer-term, stage-gated process.
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.