Advancing wholesale tokenized markets in Australia
Project Acacia is a national research initiative led by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), exploring how digital money and distributed ledger infrastructure can support wholesale tokenized asset markets.
Supported by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) and the Australian Treasury, Project Acacia brought together domestic and international banks, fintechs, custodians, fund managers, and technology providers to test real-world settlement models for tokenized assets using the HashSphere private network, Hedera public network, as well as other DLT platforms – strengthening Australia’s financial market infrastructure for the digital age.
“We chose HashSphere – a private network – primarily for regulatory reasons, however, we also needed interoperability for the seamless and transparent swap of stablecoins between Hedera and HashSphere, and even Ethereum.”
Tim Johnson
Head of Future Payments
The Challenge: Modernizing wholesale markets without compromising trust
Wholesale financial markets rely on settlement infrastructure that must balance efficiency, resilience and regulatory certainty. As tokenization of real-world assets accelerates, market participants and regulators face a critical question: how can new forms of digital money be safely integrated into existing wholesale market structures?
The answer is complicated by the fact that two very different forms of digital money are emerging in parallel – and they are not built to work together. Stablecoins are designed for broad accessibility and often operate on public networks. Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), by contrast, require tight oversight, known participants, and the ability to enforce compliance at every step. Key challenges include:
- Supporting multiple forms of digital money alongside existing settlement assets
- Maintaining regulatory oversight and financial stability
- Enabling interoperability across public and private infrastructures
- Testing real-money settlement models without introducing systemic risk
Today’s traditional systems lack the flexibility to support tokenized assets at scale, while purely public blockchain networks may not meet regulatory or operational requirements for wholesale markets.
The Solution: Bridging public and private through hybrid DLT
Project Acacia explored a hybrid approach, pairing HashSphere – a private network built with Hedera technology, alongside the public, permissioned Hedera network to support wholesale settlement and tokenized asset use cases. The pilot wholesale CBDC (wCBDC) issued by the RBA was deployed onto external third-party platforms for the first time, and HashSphere was selected as one of only three platforms approved to host pilot wCBDC.
HashSphere was chosen for its ability to:
- Support regulated, private transaction environments
- Meet institutional security, governance and compliance requirements
- Interoperate natively with the public Hedera network and other DLT platforms
Because both Hedera and HashSphere networks share a common underlying technology stack, the bridge between them could be built without translating between fundamentally different systems. This architecture enabled participants to test real-world settlement flows, including atomic delivery-versus-payment (DvP), while preserving the flexibility, transparency, and regulatory confidence required for wholesale markets.
Use Case: AP+ Token interchange
Australian Payments Plus (AP+), the operator of Australia’s domestic payments infrastructure and a Hedera Council member, designed and piloted a token interchange service intended to function as national infrastructure – capable of accepting any payment token and facilitating exchanges with tokenized assets.
The core challenge sat at the center of the project’s design. The RBA had issued the pilot wCBDC on the condition that it not reside on a public ledger. But the marketplaces and stablecoin rails the interchange needed to connect to were all public. AP+’s solution was a three-part architecture:
- A public Hedera network where the token interchange itself operated
- A private HashSphere instance where the wCBDC was held under central bank oversight
- A proxy “white coin” on the public network that represented wCBDC balances held privately, without the underlying CBDC ever crossing over
In live transactions with institutional counterparties, the interchange facilitated atomic swaps between different forms of privately-issued tokenized money, with wCBDC settling the interbank leg in the background.
Settlement times for transactions that conventionally take two to three days collapsed to minutes. Across its use cases, AP+ settled approximately $5 million in real-money transactions.
The pilot demonstrated that a token interchange built on paired public-private infrastructure could resolve the structural mismatch between stablecoins and central bank money without compromising either, and that HashSphere could support the central bank’s requirements for control, governance, and finality.
Use Case: Imperium Markets – Term deposits, certificates of deposit, and annuities
Imperium Markets – a leading Australian fintech digitising money markets and fixed income securities for issuers and wholesale investors – piloted three use cases exploring the issuance and trading of tokenized short-term wholesale money market instruments: term deposits, negotiable certificates of deposit, and annuities. The asset tokens were digital twins of the underlying instruments, and together these pilots represented the most comprehensive exploration of tokenized settlement for money market activity within Project Acacia.
In each pilot, the tokenized instruments were issued, custodied, and exchanged on the public-permissioned Hedera network. Settlement was executed using a pilot stablecoin on the same public ledger issued by Cuscal – Australia’s largest independent payments provider. That stablecoin was fully backed by a pilot wCBDC issued on HashSphere. The architecture combined the accessibility of a public marketplace with the safety of central bank money held on a private, controlled network.
A settlement coordinator service developed by AP+ orchestrated DvP in each transaction. Using smart contracts, the coordinator locked the tokenized asset and stablecoin into escrow before executing an atomic swap, ensuring that either both legs of the transaction completed or neither did. The pilots demonstrated how tokenization can foster increased liquidity and more competitive pricing dynamics in money market segments – including the negotiable certificates of deposit market – that have historically relied on phone calls, manual processes and antiquated workflows.
The collaborating parties reflected the depth of institutional engagement: AP+, AustralianSuper, Cuscal, Bank of Queensland, Challenger Limited, Colonial First State, National Australia Bank and Westpac. The participants spanned a major superannuation fund, two of Australia’s four largest banks, and a range of specialist financial institutions, providing strong evidence that the architecture worked at institutional scale.
Why HashSphere: Infrastructure designed for institutional markets
HashSphere was built for what wholesale tokenization requires. As a private network, it provides deterministic transaction finality, customer-controlled validators, and clear governance (features that allowed the RBA to retain exclusive control over key functions such as the minting, burning, and whitelisting of pilot wCBDC). Its EVM equivalence meant that the same wCBDC smart contract code could be deployed identically across HashSphere and other compatible platforms, reducing operational burden for participants.
Critically, HashSphere is not a subnet or appendage of a public network. It operates as a standalone private environment, while remaining natively interoperable with the public Hedera network through CLPR, a new cross-ledger protocol from Hashgraph and in this particular pilot because both share the same underlying technology stack. For Project Acacia, this meant that the bridge between the regulated private network and the public marketplace was structurally simpler and easier to audit than a comparable cross-chain bridge between unrelated systems would have been.
For the RBA, commercial banks, stablecoin issuers and marketplace operators participating in the project, this combination of regulated privacy and seamless public connectivity was the basis for trust in the shared infrastructure.
Public and private sectors, aligned
With support from ASIC, APRA, and the Australian Treasury, Project Acacia enabled the responsible testing of tokenized asset transactions involving real money. This collaborative model allowed regulators and industry participants to:
- Observe real-world behaviour of tokenized settlement models
- Identify operational and regulatory risks early
- Build evidence to inform future policy and infrastructure decisions
The depth of industry engagement was significant. Project Acacia ultimately involved three of Australia’s four major banks alongside leading fintechs, custodians, infrastructure providers and superannuation funds.
Summary
In May 2026, the RBA and DFCRC released the final report on Project Acacia. The findings confirmed strong potential for tokenization alongside digital money and enhanced settlement infrastructure to improve the efficiency, resilience and functionality of Australia’s wholesale financial markets, with the DFCRC estimating $24 billion in annual economic gains achievable from digital finance innovation.
Project Acacia demonstrated how private and public DLT infrastructure can work together to support real-world, regulated wholesale markets. By pairing HashSphere’s private network capabilities with the public Hedera network, the initiative provides a blueprint for how digital money and tokenized assets can be safely integrated into national financial systems.
Four of the project’s most architecturally significant use cases – the AP+ Token interchange and the three Imperium Markets pilots – ran on HashSphere, validating it as a foundation for the next generation of regulated digital financial market infrastructure.
View RBA and DFCRC’s full report on findings from Project Acacia here.
