Macropod and Project Acacia: AUDM at the centre of wholesale tokenised settlement

20 May 2026

Macropod recently participated in Project Acacia, a collaborative effort led by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), with support from ASIC, APRA and the Australian Treasury, to explore the future of digital money and tokenised assets.

As part of the project, Macropod led two of the 24 use cases selected for live and proof-of-concept testing. Both placed AUDM, our AUD-backed stablecoin, at the centre of end-to-end settlement for institutional-grade tokenised instruments, operating on the Redbelly Network, an Australian Layer 1 designed for institutional tokenisation.

The RBA media release names the settlement methods explored across the project: "ESA balances, a pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC), tokenised commercial bank deposits and stablecoins." AUDM was the stablecoin in that list.

"We've proven the model. AUDM settled real wholesale instruments end-to-end on Australian rails: a tokenised Managed Investment Scheme, and Australia's first tokenised corporate bond. The transition to tokenised markets isn't theoretical anymore. It's underway." Drew Bradford, CEO, Macropod

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Use Case 1, Tokenised Managed Investment Scheme

The first use case examined whether the operational lifecycle of a wholesale Managed Investment Scheme (MIS) could be executed using tokenised infrastructure and programmable private money, without seeking to establish new legal constructs.

MIS units were recorded and administered on Tokeniser's registry platform, with lifecycle smart contracts deployed on Redbelly Network. AUDM was the settlement asset, enabling atomic delivery versus payment on a single ledger. TAF Capital acted as trustee and custodian, and Openmarkets surfaced tokenised holdings via existing wholesale distribution rails.

The pilot executed the full MIS lifecycle over three days: issuance with atomic DvP on Day 1, a wholesale secondary trade settled atomically on Day 2, and operational redemption on Day 3. Settlement timing mismatches were removed, manual registry reconciliation was eliminated, and every lifecycle event was time-stamped on chain.

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Use Case 2, Tokenised Corporate Bond (Australia's first)

The second use case piloted Australia's first tokenised wholesale corporate bond, named CLIFFO Series 1 (Corporate Loan Investment for Future Obligations). The bond was issued by Imperium Markets on its ASIC-licensed marketplace, with bond terms and payment obligations encoded in smart contracts deployed via Yield Fabric on Redbelly Network. AUDM was the settlement asset across the full lifecycle.

Barrenjoey Markets purchased the bond in primary issuance, and JellyC bought it in secondary. Future coupon entitlements transferred automatically with the token. Two transactions that would currently take up to four days in total to be completed, took four minutes in total, with atomic settlement and automated corporate actions.

The bond use case represented a pivot from an originally approved tokenised annuity, reflecting participant readiness and providing a closer analogue to existing wholesale debt market activity while retaining the same core settlement and lifecycle objectives.

Together, these use cases demonstrated end-to-end DvP settlement of real institutional instruments using a production stablecoin on a permissioned public ledger. Not as a research artefact, but as the actual payment rail.

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Themes that emerged

AUDM is settlement-ready today.

Project Acacia explored four parallel settlement methods: ESA balances, wholesale CBDC, tokenised deposits for interbank settlement, and stablecoins. AUDM was the stablecoin tested, and our use cases showed it can deliver atomic delivery versus payment, automated lifecycle execution and on-chain corporate actions today, in production, with the programmability often associated with wholesale CBDC. AUDM's strongest role is where programmable, AFSL-regulated, AUD-denominated private settlement is the right fit: managed funds, payments, cross-border, and the broader tokenised-markets use cases that need a regulated AUD on chain.

Tokenisation extends well beyond bonds.

Our MIS use case broadens the public conversation from government debt to wholesale managed funds, instruments where servicing complexity (subscriptions, distributions, registry reconciliation) has historically been the operational bottleneck. Automating these lifecycle events on chain compresses operating cost and settlement risk across a much wider universe of assets.

Regulatory clarity is unlocking institutional adoption.

ASIC's targeted relief for Project Acacia participants gave the industry a structured pathway to test live transactions. Both of our use cases operated within existing AFSL, trust and stablecoin arrangements. No novel regulatory constructs were required. Combined with the deposit token and stablecoin policy work flagged in the final report, this is the kind of scoped regulatory engagement that lets Australian institutions commit budget and engineering time to tokenised infrastructure with confidence.

Coordination across the stack is what makes a use case work.

A working DvP settlement is the visible output, but it sits on top of a coordinated stack: issuer, registry, marketplace, ledger, custodian, stablecoin issuer, regulator. Macropod's role was to provide the AUDM settlement leg. The result depended on every other partner doing their part: TAF Capital, Tokeniser, Openmarkets, Imperium Markets, Yield Fabric, Redbelly Network, Barrenjoey Markets and JellyC.

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What comes next

Project Acacia's final report sets out a multi-stream forward program, including a proposed digital financial market infrastructure regulatory sandbox, tokenised government bonds, continued industry-led work on interoperable commercial bank deposit tokens, continued exploration of wholesale CBDC, and tokenised money for wholesale cross-border payments. Macropod is committed to supporting each of these streams where AUDM and the broader Macropod platform can contribute.

"Project Acacia is the start, not the end. We look forward to working with the RBA, DFCRC, ASIC and industry to take what we've learnt with AUDM into production, and to extend it across the next streams of work." John Pearce, Principal, Macropod

We thank the Reserve Bank of Australia, the DFCRC, ASIC, APRA, the Australian Treasury, our use case partners and our fellow participating organisations for the collaboration.

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Read the supporting artefacts

• Macropod / Catena Digital: Project Acacia Tokenised Bond Report
• Macropod / Catena Digitial: Project Acacia Tokenised MIS Report
• Imperium Markets media release, First Ever Tokenised Corporate Bond Issued in Australia‍
• JellyC, Project Acacia: Tokenisation, The Future of Funds Management‍
• RBA, Media release (mr-26-13)‍
• RBA / DFCRC, Project Acacia final report (PDF)

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