Australia’s Project Acacia is leading the way for central banks around the world, exploring how a wholesale CBDC issued on a third-party blockchain can support digital asset innovation and Fireblocks is proud to powering it.
Project Acacia is a research initiative led by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) that explores how digital forms of money—including central bank digital currency (CBDC), stablecoins, and deposit tokens—can support the development of wholesale tokenized asset markets in Australia.
Project Acacia is being conducted in two phases:
- Phase One, completed in 2024, focused on conceptual research and established a design framework for settlement models using different forms of digital money.
- Phase Two, currently underway, involves developing and testing prototypes of selected models for the settlement of transactions in tokenized assets, framed by industry-led use cases.
Fireblocks as a Lead Use Case Participant
Fireblocks is exploring the use of wholesale CBDC to enable atomic settlement of tokenized securities and other forms of tokenized money.
In collaboration with NotCentralised, Redbelly Network, the Australian Bond Exchange (ABE), and Fasanara Capital, we aim to demonstrate how a wholesale CBDC can be used to reduce counterparty risk through delivery-versus-payment (DvP) settlement of tokenized securities, while simultaneously ensuring the singleness of money between the different stablecoins held by the buyer and seller of the security.
This use case aims to demonstrate:
- Seamless workflows for the issuance, trading, and atomic settlement of tokenized securities on a permissioned public blockchain
- The benefits of combining central bank-issued digital money with tokenized forms of private money, such as deposit tokens and stablecoins
- Increased efficiency, reduced counterparty risk, and greater composability via programmable, on-chain settlement infrastructure
This includes testing the end-to-end capabilities required for the issuance, trading, settlement, and distribution of a tokenized security to clients of commercial banks holding Exchange Settlement Accounts (ESAs).
The proof-of-concept involves simulated transactions, with plans to progress towards a live pilot using real assets and money in future phases. The transaction itself is set within the Australian market, denominated in Australian Dollars (AUD), and involves the transfer of security ownership, where commercial bank money is swapped for wholesale CBDC (wCBDC) on the Redbelly blockchain for asset settlement.
Fireblocks as a Technology Vendor
Fireblocks has been selected as a technology provider to Project Acacia, providing the wallet infrastructure to securely deploy, govern, and manage the CBDC issued on a number of third-party blockchains. This reflects our proven ability to deliver secure, scalable wallet infrastructure trusted by more than 2,400 financial institutions globally. Our goal is not limited to supporting the pilot itself, but to laying the foundation for how digital money and tokenized assets will be governed, issued, and settled in the Australian market and beyond.
Our contributions to Project Acacia:
- Secure Wallet Infrastructure: Fireblocks is providing Project Acacia with dedicated workspaces to facilitate the tokenization, issuance, and secure transfer of digital assets. This infrastructure is designed for compliance and security, crucial for pilots involving real money and assets.
- Seamless Settlement and Interoperability: Fireblocks is delivering core smart contract functionality that ensures Delivery-versus-Payment settlement and maintains singleness of money across wCBDC, stablecoins, and deposit tokens — an essential foundation for future interoperability.
- Fireblocks is developing and deploying a settlement contract, operated via an ABE-owned workspace, to facilitate Delivery-versus-Payment (DvP) swaps between the tokenized security and wCBDC. This contract can also interact with other contracts to enable the use of various forms of tokenized money in the swap.
- A critical component developed and deployed by Fireblocks, this contract aims to enable simple 1:1 swaps between commercial bank money, stablecoins and wCBDC. This functionality is vital for maintaining the singleness of money across different digital forms and is designed to be operated with the approval of the central bank, potentially as a public utility.
- Scalable Architecture: The wallet and contract infrastructure we are deploying is blockchain-agnostic, enabling Project Acacia to extend beyond Redbelly Network to other permissioned and public chains as the ecosystem evolves.
Why Fireblocks:
- Trusted by institutions worldwide – Fireblocks already powers over $10 trillion in digital asset transfers to date, including $200B+ in stablecoin transactions every month. This institutional-grade credibility positions us as a natural partner for central banks, regulators, and market operators.
- Proven CBDC and tokenization expertise – Fireblocks brings direct experience from the first phase of the Australian CBDC pilot, as well as other wholesale CBDC, tokenization, and stablecoin programs globally.
- Defense-in-depth security – our wallet infrastructure is built on MPC and hardware isolation, already relied on by Tier-1 banks, asset managers, and global payment providers.
Fireblocks’ prior experience from the first phase of the CBDC pilot and our work in Project Acacia is helping to define the standards for how wholesale CBDC and tokenized money interact in practical, risk-reduced settlement workflows and, in doing so, advance Australia’s digital finance infrastructure. By exploring how a wholesale CBDC can enable secure, efficient settlement across various forms of tokenized money, we aim to lay the groundwork for scalable tokenized asset markets — in Australia first, but with global applicability.
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Join us at Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt from 29 September – 2 October: Explore the future of tokenized finance and see how Fireblocks is helping shape the next generation of digital asset infrastructure. Meet our team at Stand DISL68 – Discover to learn more about our work with global financial institutions: https://info.fireblocks.com/sibos-2025
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