Hedera Joins Central Bank-Led Project Acacia as Stablecoin Research Accelerates

• Hedera has joined an ongoing project led by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) to explore digital money.
• Twenty-four innovative use cases have been selected for the next stage. 

The Hedera Foundation has confirmed that Hedera has joined “Project Acacia” to explore how digital money could support the development of Australia’s broad tokenized market. According to reports, this project is led by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC).

The Details of the Project

Project Acacia was earlier highlighted in a consultation paper released in November 2024. In that report, there was a call for “industry feedback and expressions of interest in participating.” Since then, the project has been advancing as planned. According to a press release by the RBA, the team has conditionally selected 24 innovative use cases ranging from local fintechs to major banks.

Nineteen pilot use cases are reported to involve real-money and real-asset transactions. The remaining five are said to be proof-of-concept use cases involving simulation transactions. Meanwhile, the use cases include a variety of assets such as private markets, fixed income, trade receivables, and carbon credits.

Shedding more light on this, the RBA disclosed that some of the proposed settlement assets for the use cases include bank deposit tokens, stablecoin, pilot wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), etc. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has provided relief to participants to support the project.

Testing of the use cases is expected to occur over the next six months. Following this, a report on the findings will be published in the first quarter of 2026 (Q1 2026).

Commenting on this, Assistant Governor (Financial System) at the RBA, Brad Jones, highlighted that the use cases would help them to better understand the impact of innovation in Central Bank and private digital money.

Ensuring that Australia’s payments and monetary arrangements are fit-for-purpose in the digital age is a strategic priority for the RBA and the Payments System Board. Project Acacia represents an opportunity for further collaborative exploration on tokenized asset markets and the future of money by the public and private sectors in Australia.

Recent Integrations on the Hedera Network

Apart from this significant move, Hedera was recently selected for India’s first state carbon bank to secure carbon trading. As noted in our earlier post, the Hedera Group would be responsible for designing and building the blockchain system for the bank. Additionally, the Australian Stablecoin AUDD has also launched on the Hedera network, as indicated in our recent blog post.

Amidst the backdrop of this, HBAR, the native token of Hedera, has surged by 4.7% in the last 24 hours, extending its weekly run to 10.6% and trading at $0.17.

According to our recent analysis, the asset has the potential to surge to $0.4 if this momentum continues. However, HBAR would first have to breach the $0.2 and the $0.21 resistance range, as explained in our last analysis.

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