RBA publishes Project Acacia final report — Chainlink runtime coordinated settlement in the Westpac use case
EV-063 · Reserve Bank of Australia (Project Acacia) · 2026-05-19 · Evidence class: pilot · Confidence 99%
In plain English
In plain terms: Australia’s central bank ran a large experiment on digital money and published the results. In one of the tests, Westpac used Chainlink software to settle tokenized deposits through the RBA’s existing payment system — the point being that banks would not need to replace their infrastructure to use this.
Detail
Evidence class: PILOT. The Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance CRC published the final report of Project Acacia, a six-month experimentation programme (August 2025 – February 2026) spanning 20 use cases — 12 involving real money and real asset transactions, including a world-first pilot issuance of wholesale central bank digital currency on both public and private DLT platforms. The Chainlink use case: • Westpac Institutional Bank, Chainlink, and Imperium Markets tested settlement of tokenized term deposits by bridging DLT-based asset platforms with Australia’s existing payment rails — using PayTo through the New Payments Platform and connecting to the RBA’s RITS Fast Settlement Service. • Chainlink’s runtime coordinated the asset and cash legs of the settlement across systems. • The use case demonstrated that DLT-based marketplaces can settle against existing central bank infrastructure — no new settlement rail required. The RBA’s release notes industry estimates that innovations of this kind "could deliver $24 billion in annual economic gains" across Australian markets. Deployment status, precisely: the Westpac–Chainlink use case was a proof-of-concept within a programme whose other streams included real-money pilots.
Why it matters
A central bank published, in its own final report, that Chainlink’s runtime coordinated settlement between tokenized asset platforms and the RBA’s own RITS infrastructure — with Westpac, one of Australia’s Big Four banks, as the institutional participant. Evidence class is pilot: a completed proof-of-concept inside an official central bank programme.
Primary source: RBA media release mr-26-13 + Project Acacia final report PDF (May 19, 2026)
Verified — published on rba.gov.au
Topics: Central Banks, RBA, Australia, Westpac, CRE, Settlement, Tokenisation, wCBDC
