Fireblocks Joins Project Acacia to Explore the Role of Digital Money in Wholesale Tokenised Asset Markets

Sydney, Australia – 10 July 2025 – Fireblocks, an enterprise platform providing digital asset infrastructure solutions to businesses building on blockchain, is proud to announce its participation in Project Acacia, an initiative led by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) exploring how digital forms of money—such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), stablecoins, and deposit tokens—could support the development of wholesale tokenised asset markets in Australia.

Project Acacia is being conducted in two phases: the first phase, completed in 2024, focused on conceptual research and defined a ‘design space’ for potential settlement models using different forms of digital money. The second phase, currently underway, involves developing and testing prototypes of selected models for the settlement of transactions in tokenised assets, framed by industry-led use cases.

Fireblocks’ proposal—developed in collaboration with companies including NotCentralised, Redbelly Network, Australian Bond Exchange, Fasanara Capital, and Perpetual Trustee Company—has been conditionally selected for experimentation as part of Phase 2. The use case seeks to demonstrate how a wholesale CBDC can be used to reduce counterparty risk through delivery-versus-payment (DvP) settlement of tokenised securities, while simultaneously ensuring the singleness of money between the different stablecoin and deposit tokens held by the buyer and seller of the security.

The project aims to demonstrate:

• Seamless workflows for issuance, trading and atomic settlement of tokenised securities on a permissioned public blockchain
• The potential benefits of combining central bank-issued digital money with tokenised forms of private money, such as deposit tokens and stablecoins
• Increased efficiency, reduced counterparty risk, and enhanced composability through programmable, on-chain settlement infrastructure

Initially launched as a proof of concept using test networks and simulated assets, the use case may progress to a pilot with real-world transactions, depending on results and regulatory guidance.

“Fireblocks is honoured to support the applied research effort of Project Acacia and contribute to exploring innovative models for the future of settlement in tokenised asset markets,” said Michael Shaulov, CEO of Fireblocks. “We are proud to collaborate with regulators and leading market participants to test infrastructure that could enhance the efficiency, resilience, and inclusiveness of Australia’s financial system.”

Arturo Rodriguez, CEO of NotCentralised, commented, “Project Acacia is playing a pivotal role for the development of open capital markets. Through this collaboration, we are executing the first end-to-end securitised flow connecting capital markets to the real world economy using blockchain rails. As a capital markets advisory in emerging technologies and a financial engineering studio, we are humbled by the opportunity to have designed and structured the first privacy enhanced securitisation flow on a public blockchain with a CBDC.”

”Redbelly Network is the only public blockchain selected to support a wholesale CBDC for the purposes of the exploratory work in Project Acacia. It is our view that CBDCs will become a foundational component of modern capital markets, enabling the interoperability of stablecoins and deposit tokens - private money by underwriting peg stability. Unlike stablecoins, CBDC carries sovereign counterparty risk - effectively zero, while Redbelly’s deterministic finality eliminates settlement risk. Together, these features provide the secure and compliant infrastructure required for a programmable Open Capital Market,” said Alan Burt, Chairman of Redbelly Network.

"Fasanara Capital is excited to collaborate with industry experts and regulators through Project Acacia to explore the future of tokenised settlement," said Francesco Filia, CEO at Fasanara Capital. "This joint initiative reflects the importance of industry-wide cooperation in shaping the innovative infrastructure that could better support the evolving needs of wholesale markets."

Project Acacia is overseen by a Steering Committee comprising senior representatives from the RBA, DFCRC, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), and Treasury. Varun Paul, Senior Director of Financial Markets at Fireblocks, is a member of the Industry Advisory Group which has also been established to provide broad-based input into the project. The RBA and DFCRC intend to publish a report on the project’s findings by the end of 2025.

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