Australia’s central bank completed something most financial institutions are still theorizing about. The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), along with the Digital Finance CRC (DFCRC), published its May 2026 final report on Project Acacia.
This is a hands-on research program that issued a real pilot wholesale CBDC (wCBDC) and used it to settle live trades of tokenised assets across multiple blockchain networks. Crypto researcher SMQKE (@SMQKEDQG) shared the details, noting that both XRP Ledger and Hedera made the cut.
‼️JUST IN: AUSTRALIA’S RBA DEPLOYS WHOLESALE CBDC DIRECTLY ONTO XRPL AND HEDERA NETWORKS IN PROJECT ACACIA‼️
The Reserve Bank of Australia just ran real money on both the XRPL and Hedera.💸
This is a massive development.🙇♂️
Project Acacia is a hands-on research program run by… pic.twitter.com/s2REdKPlNN
— SMQKE (@SMQKEDQG) May 19, 2026
Project Acacia
Project Acacia ran pilot use cases across a range of public and private distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms. These included Canvas Connect, Ethereum, Hedera, Redbelly Network, and XRP Ledger. Participants ranged from domestic and international banks to fintechs, custodians, fund managers, exchanges, and stablecoin issuers.
The wCBDC issued for the project represented a real legal claim on the RBA. It was denominated in Australian dollars and redeemable at par at the project’s conclusion. The asset classes tested were extensive. Government bonds, corporate bonds, private credit, asset-backed securities, repos, carbon credits, and mining royalties all featured across the various use cases.
XRP Ledger: End-to-End Bond Settlement
Zerocap piloted the complete lifecycle of an Australian Government bond tokenized as a digital twin on a public-permissioned network. The use case covered primary issuance, secondary trading, redemption, a central limit order book, and an automated market maker, with settlement in RLUSD stablecoin.
The DLT network used was the XRP Ledger. Notably, the European Central Bank has previously explored XRP for a wCBDC pilot, and this move by the RBA is another major step in cementing XRP’s place in global finance.
Hedera: Token Interchange at Scale
Australian Payments Plus (AP+) piloted an interchange service on a public network that facilitated the exchange of different forms of privately issued tokenized money, including stablecoins and deposit tokens, using rules captured in a smart contract.
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The DLT networks used were public-permissioned Hedera and private-permissioned Hedera HashSphere. A digital twin of wCBDC served as the interchange asset on the public network while the underlying wCBDC resided on a private network.
What This Means for XRP
XRP Ledger just processed a full government bond lifecycle with JPMorgan custody, using RLUSD as the settlement asset in a central bank research program. The network demonstrated it can handle the compliance requirements, asset structures, and settlement finality that wholesale markets demand.
XRP’s participation in a formally documented RBA program puts the network’s institutional credentials on record. SMQKE noted that “public ISO 20022-compliant blockchains just passed a central-bank test in Australia’s wholesale markets.” The official report speaks for itself.
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