SYDNEY, April 24, 2026, 07:16 AEST
National Australia Bank said on Friday it had tested issuing and maturing a tokenised term deposit using stablecoins in Project Acacia, the digital-money program run with the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre. The bank said the proof-of-concept transactions were completed with Imperium Markets on a marketplace licensed by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
The timing is notable. Parliament records show the Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Act 2026 received assent on April 8, and the RBA said last month that the final Project Acacia report would be published in late April. That puts NAB’s update just as the legal framework is clearer and the central bank is preparing its next roadmap for wholesale, institution-to-institution tokenised markets.
NAB said the test focused on a tokenised term deposit — a fixed-term bank deposit represented in digital form — with a stablecoin, a digital token designed to hold a steady value, used as the money leg. It also said it took part in a Deposit Token Working Group examining whether a tokenised claim on a bank can be treated as a deposit under Australian law.
Jonathan Adams, NAB’s executive for enterprise payments and digital assets, said the lender was taking a customer-led approach. Cathryn Carver, the bank’s group executive for corporate and institutional banking, said emerging digital-asset tools could improve efficiency and user experience, while warning that innovation had to be balanced against consumer protection and system stability.
NAB is not alone. CommBank said it joined Project Acacia to study digital currencies and tokenised collateral in Australia’s A$350 billion repo market, a key source of short-term funding, while ANZ said its own Acacia work covered tokenised trade payables and bonds. The RBA’s list of lead participants also included Westpac.
The central bank has been leaning in. RBA Assistant Governor Brad Jones said in a March speech that the main question for Australia’s financial system was now “how, not whether” tokenisation would develop. In a Q&A the same day, he said Acacia had lifted bank engagement from a low base and that the Deposit Token Working Group would continue and expand after the project. Reserve Bank of Australia
But there are still real snags. The RBA has said legal uncertainty, coordination failures and interoperability problems have all slowed tokenised markets in Australia, and that more work is needed on issues such as smart contracts and how stablecoins, deposit tokens and existing settlement rails fit together. NAB likewise said the technology brings a new set of risks and considerations.
Rod Lewis, chair of Imperium Markets, said the tests showed how quickly capital could move once the plumbing was digitised. “What would have taken days, took minutes,” he said. NAB News
That still leaves a long way between a controlled pilot and broad commercial use. The RBA has already flagged a new sandbox for wholesale-market experiments, a review of access settings around central bank settlement accounts and an expanded deposit-token workstream, with the Acacia report due later this month. For now, NAB’s disclosure sits firmly in the pilot phase.
