The Reserve Bank has spoken. Morgan Stanley has run the numbers. And Macropod has been in the room, doing the work.

On Monday, the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre released the Final Report for Project Acacia — Australia’s most substantive government-backed investigation into the tokenisation of wholesale financial markets. Released the same week as Morgan Stanley's Digital Rails, Real Economics BluePaper, the message from global institutions is consistent: the future of financial markets runs on programmable digital rails.

At Macropod, we’re proud to have made our AUDM stablecoin part of Project Acacia.  

We’re looking forward to where Acacia takes us next.

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The Case for Tokenisation in Australian Financial Markets

RBA Assistant Governor Brad Jones put the question bluntly in a March 2026 speech: the issue is no longer whether tokenisation has a future in Australia's financial system, "but rather, how." ("After Acacia: The Next Era of Financial System Innovation?", Brad Jones, RBA, 25 March 2026.)

The economic case behind that view is substantial. Research by the DFCRC estimates that tokenisation could deliver around A$24 billion per annum in economic gains to Australia across better markets, better payments, and better assets — with potential gains in fixed-income markets alone of A$2 billion per annum, driven by more efficient post-trade processing, improved collateral utilisation, and reduced settlement failure costs. On current trajectories, with only 4% of real-world assets expected to be tokenised by 2030, the DFCRC estimates Australia would capture only around A$1 billion of that potential.

The Project Acacia Final Report is direct about what is holding markets back: Australia's wholesale financial markets have "features that have changed little in a generation and rely on antiquated technology like phone calls and emails." The use cases in the project showed what replacing those features could deliver: compressed settlement cycles, reduced counterparty risk, freed-up collateral, 24/7 investor access to liquidity, and automated lifecycle management for fixed-income instruments. Thirteen of the twenty use cases focused on fixed income — consistent with global experience, and consistent with where the efficiency gaps are largest.

Morgan Stanley's May 2026 Digital Rails, Real Economics BluePaper adds global scale to the picture, identifying cross-border payments, collateral management, funding and liquidity, and investor services as the areas where digital rails deliver "lower costs, faster settlement, 24/7 access, and improved collateral mobility" — with tokenised money, including stablecoins and tokenised deposits, forming "the foundational layer for broader activity."  Total global issuance of tokenised real-world assets exceeded US$30 billion as of early May 2026, having grown sharply in recent years with some analyses projecting growth to US$30 trillion by the mid-2030s.

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How Tokenisation Works — and Why Settlement Is the Core

To understand why tokenisation matters, it helps to understand what it replaces.

Today, settling a financial transaction requires a chain of sequential steps across custodians, registries, central securities depositories, interbank messaging, and settlement systems — each with their own timing windows and points of failure. Settlement typically occurs at T+2, meaning both parties carry counterparty risk for two days after a trade is executed. Capital is tied up. Collateral is locked. Operational teams reconcile across systems.

Tokenisation, combined with programmable digital money on the same platform, compresses this timeline substantially. When both an asset and a payment instrument exist on the same distributed ledger, settlement can occur atomically — simultaneously and irreversibly, at any time of day or night. As the Acacia Final Report describes it: "exchange occurring instantly on a 24/7/365 basis rather than only during the operating hours of a traditional settlement system."

The benefits extend across the full asset lifecycle. Shorter settlement cycles reduce counterparty risk and free up collateral. Automated compliance checks embedded in smart contracts reduce operational errors. Programmable coupon payments and bondholder voting reduce administrative costs for issuers. And fractionalisation opens previously illiquid asset classes to a broader investor base, which, as the Acacia Report notes, "could particularly benefit smaller and first-time issuers."

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Macropod in Project Acacia: Two Pilots, One Clear Purpose

Our CEO, Drew Bradford, served on the Industry Advisory Group for Project Acacia, providing advice to the Steering Committee across the full course of the project.  Macropod participated as a lead participant, running two real-money pilot use cases using our AUD-denominated stablecoin, AUDM, as the settlement asset. If you’re interested in the details, my colleague John Pearce published a blog post yesterday on each use case.  An overview is below.

The Final Report describes both Macropod-led pilots:

"The first use case tested issuance, trading and redemption of tokenised units in a wholesale managed investment scheme, with registration and distribution handled through the Tokeniser platform. The second use case tested a tokenised corporate bond, including issuance, secondary trading, coupon payments, and maturity, with transactions carried out on the Imperium Marketplace. For both pilots, settlement was achieved using Macropod's AUD-denominated stablecoin (AUDM)."

Both use cases operated on the Redbelly Network, a public-permissioned blockchain, with collaborating parties including Tokeniser Pty Ltd, TAF Capital, Openmarkets Australia, Imperium Markets, and Barrenjoey Markets.

These were real transactions, conducted with real money, in a live market environment. AUDM settled actual trades in a tokenised managed investment scheme and a tokenised corporate bond — two of the most economically significant asset classes in Australian wholesale markets.

The Acacia Report highlights a particular feature of how Macropod and its pilot partners structured their use cases. Unlike most participants, who adopted "digital twin" token structures that reference assets held in traditional registries, Macropod and TAF Capital's Digital Asset Fund use case adopted a digital native approach — treating the blockchain record as the primary record of ownership of the fund. The report notes this was adopted by only two use cases in the entire project and describes digital native structures as "the preferred target state" cited by participants, offering "lower operational complexity, streamlined custody arrangements, and greater opportunities for programmability."  It’s no coincidence that the AUDM stablecoin, which evidences ownership of a unit in our reserve unit trust, is also deployed natively, with no off-chain mirror of the unit trust registry. 

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Why AUD Stablecoins Are the Answer

One of the central findings of Project Acacia is that the benefits of asset tokenisation are substantially amplified when the money used for settlement is also tokenised and located on the same platform as the assets being traded.

The Acacia Report is explicit: stablecoins were "the predominant form of tokenised private money explored in Project Acacia," used across multiple use cases to achieve atomic on-chain settlement. Several participants expressed stronger comfort with stablecoins as settlement assets when those stablecoins were backed by high-quality assets or central bank money — an arrangement explored in the Imperium Markets and NotCentralised use cases.

AUDM was designed for exactly this purpose: a fully AUD-denominated settlement asset capable of functioning on public-permissioned blockchain infrastructure. The two Macropod pilots demonstrate that an AUD stablecoin can perform the settlement function across the asset classes that matter most to Australian wholesale markets.

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Australia's Policy Framework: A Government Moving with Intention

Project Acacia was led by the RBA and DFCRC, with ASIC, APRA, and the Australian Treasury all participating in its governance — working through technical, regulatory, and commercial questions in real time, together. The RBA has identified shaping the future of money in Australia as a strategic priority of its Payments System Board.  

Significant change is currently taking place that will impact and better enable tokenised markets:

• ASIC has updated its guidance on the financial product classification of digital assets. 
• The Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill 2025 was passed in April 2026, with a commencement date of April 2027.  
• The Australian Government is advancing a dedicated regulatory regime for stablecoins under its payments licensing reforms — the "tokenised stored value facility" framework.  Tranche 1 of the payment service provider reforms, which amend a range of current legislation, are expected to reach parliament in July.  APRA’s draft prudential standards for stablecoins are expected to follow soon afterwards.
• The Attorney-General's Department is working to implement the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records, which would give digitised trade records the same legal standing as paper-based instruments.

The post-Acacia program of work includes exploration of a Digital Financial Market Infrastructure sandbox, a reconstituted joint regulator-industry tokenisation advisory group, a tokenised government bond initiative, and RBA consultation on settlement infrastructure upgrades. As the Acacia Final Report concludes, realising Australia's potential requires "sustained commitment and coordination across industry, regulators, and Government."

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What Comes Next

Project Acacia has demonstrated what is possible. The policy settings are advancing. The economic modelling is clear.

Closing the gap between Australia's A$1 billion trajectory and its A$24 billion potential requires industry to move from experimentation to infrastructure-building — legal clarity on digital native structures and settlement finality, interoperability between platforms, and AUD-denominated settlement assets that issuers, investors, and market operators can rely on.

Macropod is building that infrastructure. Project Acacia was the start.

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