Following this announcement, the Reserve Bank of Australia mentioned its plan to focus on a wholesale central bank digital currency, in order to offer more promising benefits and fewer challenges than a retail version.
In addition, the financial institution is expected to prioritise the process of remaining compliant with the regulatory requirements and laws of the industry, while also focusing on meeting the needs, preferences, and demands of customers and clients in an ever-evolving market.
According to CoinDesk, Australia has been exploring the CBDC use cases for several years, as its central bank also mentioned that it hadn’t been able to identify a clear public benefit for a retail CBDC because the current retail payment system well serves individuals and citizens. Nonetheless, the RBA and Treasury remained open to the possibility that this could change over time as potential benefits and costs are better understood.
Australia is committing to a three-year applied research program on the future of digital money in the region, and it is also expected to launch the public phase of Project Acacia. This initiative was developed in order to explore opportunities to optimise wholesale markets while using central bank money through tokenisation and new settlement infrastructure. The focus will also be on the process of understanding how new ledger arrangements and concepts like ‘programmability’ and ‘atomic settlement’ work in tokenised markets, as well as how they could unlock benefits for the Australian financial system and an overall wider economy.
The RBA and Treasury are also expected to undertake some form of public engagement on retail CBDC in 2025, while also carrying out further research and experimentation in the following years. A further paper from the RBA and Treasury will be released in 2027, in which the financial institutions will examine the merits and potential form of a retail CBDC as well.
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