Australia’s future payment rails could soon be built to handle stablecoins and other forms of tokenised fiat, according to a new draft vision aimed at guiding the nation’s account-to-account systems.
The draft — produced by the Account-to-Account Payments Roundtable (a group that includes AusPayNet, Australian Payments Plus, the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Commonwealth Treasury) — explicitly calls out digital assets as a force likely to reshape how Australians pay and how payments settle. It notes that “tokenised forms of money, such as stablecoins and tokenised liabilities, are moving from experimentation to adoption,” and that programmable, ledger-based value could enable new settlement models with broader availability and greater automation.
A central recommendation is that account-to-account rails may need to support “secure interoperability between account-based money and tokenised representations of fiat currency.” In practice, that would let funds move more seamlessly between traditional bank deposits and tokenised versions of fiat money — but the draft stresses that trust, reliability and security must remain core design principles for any changes.
The paper arrives as Australia accelerates practical work and regulation around tokenised money. In July 2025 the RBA and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre selected use cases for Project Acacia, an initiative examining settlement in tokenised asset markets. The RBA has said possible settlement assets under study include stablecoins, bank deposit tokens, a pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) and exchange settlement account tools.
Separately, Australia’s Treasury has proposed new digital-asset legislation (introduced in November) that would create regulated categories for digital asset platforms and tokenised custody platforms, treating them as financial products that require an Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL).
Taken together, the draft vision and parallel projects signal Australia’s payments ecosystem preparing to integrate tokenised money — while insisting any transition must protect the fundamentals of a trusted, secure payments system.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
