Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), J.P. Morgan, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and HQLAX have completed their collaboration under Project Acacia - a joint initiative led by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), exploring the role of digital money in tokenised wholesale markets.
The collaboration highlights how digital currencies and digital collateral records can improve the speed, efficiency and resilience of Australia’s $350 billion repo market.
The repo market has increasingly been seen as a leading candidate for tokenisation as global markets shift toward faster, more automated infrastructure. Australia’s repo market plays a vital role in the economy by:
- Providing essential short-term funding for banks and financial institutions
- Enabling the RBA to implement monetary policy
- Facilitating liquidity management across the financial system
- Supporting the efficient functioning of government bond markets
The CBA use case combined global and domestic infrastructure, including J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys multi-asset tokenisation platform, CBA’s Gravital digital assets platform, HQLAX’s collateral mobility solution and ASX’s local market expertise, to test interoperable settlement models in a controlled test environment.
As part of the use case, repo transactions were settled using CBA Deposit Token and wholesale Australian Dollar Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), with the securities leg orchestrated on the HQLAX platform using tokenised assets held at ASX.
“Tokenisation is moving from theory into real-world application in core financial markets and has the potential to reshape how systemically important funding markets operate,” said Sophie Gilder, Managing Director, Blockchain and Digital Assets at CBA.
“For a market as critical as repo, even small gains in speed, liquidity and risk reduction can have system-wide impact. With technology maturing, regulatory progress underway and global investment accelerating, the conditions are now falling into place for tokenisation to scale.”
Bianca Bates, head of J.P. Morgan Payments in Australia and New Zealand said: “This signals a turning point for Australia’s repo market, showing that digital money and tokenised assets can deliver the speed, transparency and resilience that modern financial systems demand.
“We’re creating a pathway for key players to transition to next-generation infrastructure. Kinexys by J.P. Morgan provided the blockchain infrastructure to make this possible, building on our track record of processing over USD$3 trillion in notional volume of transactions.”
Richard Glen, Solutions Architect at HQLAX said: “Project Acacia demonstrates how tokenised collateral and digital cash can materially enhance efficiency, liquidity and resilience in capital markets. Importantly, the initiative highlights how interoperable digital technology can evolve in alignment with regulatory expectations, supporting the next generation of robust and well-governed market infrastructure.”
For more information about Project Acacia, visit the RBA website.
