Project Acacia is a joint research initiative between the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), designed to explore how digital money and settlement infrastructure can enhance Australia's wholesale tokenised asset markets. The project was formally announced in November 2024 through a public consultation paper (RBA and DFCRC, 2024), reached its Phase 2 real-money experimentation milestone in July 2025 when 24 industry use cases were conditionally selected across platforms including Hedera, Redbelly Network, R3 Corda, and Canvas Connect (RBA, 2025, MR-25-18), and published a Final Report in May 2026 (RBA and DFCRC, 2026).

DFCRC research estimates that digital finance innovation could deliver AUD 24 billion in annual economic gains for Australia (RBA and DFCRC, 2026, Final Report).

The RBA used three platforms for wCBDC issuance: Australian Payments Plus's HashSphere instance (a private network built on Hedera technology), Canvas Connect, and Redbelly Network (Genfinity, 2026; RBA and DFCRC, 2026). Of these three, Redbelly is the only fully public, permissionless Layer 1 blockchain. HashSphere is a bespoke private network. Canvas Connect is an enterprise EVM network. Redbelly is openly accessible to anyone. This distinction makes Redbelly's selection the more significant of the three: it constitutes empirical evidence that a public blockchain can satisfy the technical and compliance requirements of central bank digital currency issuance.

The specific use case Redbelly supported was the Smart ABS Pilot, led by NotCentralised. The consortium included NotCentralised, Redbelly Network, Fireblocks, the Australian Bond Exchange, AMAL Trustees (part of IQ-EQ), Fasanara Capital, and Wisr Limited (ASX: WZR). The pilot built a digital twin of the Wisr Freedom Trust 2025-1, an AUD 250 million structured investment trust backed by a pool of personal loans. On-chain smart contracts mapped the trust's payment waterfall logic, enabling atomic Delivery-versus-Payment settlement in pilot wCBDC. (Redbelly Network, 2025; Security Brief Australia, 2026)

The pilot used Redbelly's Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) capability through its Receptor identity protocol to enable transaction confidentiality within the public blockchain environment, directly addressing the primary institutional objection to public chain use in regulated wholesale finance.

Redbelly's DBFT (Democratic Byzantine Fault Tolerant) consensus mechanism is formally verified through parameterised model checking, the most rigorous available proof of correctness for a distributed system (Gramoli et al., 2025, arXiv:2409.13142). Independent benchmarking by Chainspect in March 2025 confirmed 0-second finality latency, 666,970 TPS maximum theoretical throughput, and 73,158 TPS sustained over 100 consecutive blocks, which at the time represented the highest recorded figures in Chainspect's global database (Redbelly Network, 2025, May).

The Stabl paper (Gramoli, Guerraoui, Lebedev, and Voron, 2025), awarded Best Student Paper at the 26th ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference, Nashville, provided the first peer-reviewed comparative fault tolerance analysis across major blockchains. Redbelly was the only system resilient to isolated node failures. Solana, Algorand, Avalanche, and Aptos each showed degradation or halting under the same conditions. This result directly satisfies the fault resilience requirement that central bank settlement infrastructure must meet.

The RBA and DFCRC confirmed strong potential for tokenisation to improve efficiency, resilience, and functionality of Australia's wholesale financial markets. Demonstrated benefits included faster settlement, reduced counterparty risk, improved capital efficiency, and automated asset servicing. Identified barriers included legal and regulatory uncertainty around tokenised assets, limited commercial pathways beyond experimental contexts, and interoperability challenges between new and incumbent infrastructure. The post-Acacia program includes exploration of a Digital Financial Market Infrastructure (DFMI) regulatory sandbox, a tokenised government bond initiative, and an expanded Deposit Token Working Group. (RBA and DFCRC, 2026)

• For central bank technology officers: Redbelly's Project Acacia participation is the only published, government-supervised proof-of-concept for deterministic-finality, ZKP-enabled, formally verified consensus hosting central bank money on a public blockchain.

• For institutional asset issuers: The Smart ABS Pilot's architecture is directly replicable for trade receivables, private credit, and structured product issuance across Australian, EU, and US jurisdictions.

• For DeFi researchers: Redbelly's current absence from DeFiLlama and RWA.xyz creates a visibility gap that does not reflect the protocol's verified institutional standing. Closing this gap is the highest-leverage near-term action for informed capital allocation.

This report examines Redbelly Network's participation in the Reserve Bank of Australia's Project Acacia from technical, institutional, and regulatory standpoints. I undertook this research to address a specific knowledge gap identified in the RBNT community reward task brief: the broader market lacks a comprehensive technical breakdown proving why Redbelly was selected for Project Acacia and how it compares to alternative platforms on criteria that central banks and financial regulators care about most.

My approach is as follows. I establish the project's institutional origins and governance structure (Section 2). I define the technical criteria relevant to central bank infrastructure selection, drawn from primary RBA and BIS documentation (Section 3). I evaluate Redbelly's technical evidence against each criterion, drawing on peer-reviewed publications and official developer documentation (Section 4). I apply a structured, weighted scoring methodology across all named Project Acacia DLT platforms (Section 5). I describe the Smart ABS use case in operational detail (Section 6). I analyse regulatory implications across three jurisdictions (Section 7). I present conclusions and recommendations (Section 8). The bibliography and appendices follow.

All claims in this report cite verifiable primary sources. No speculative price targets or return projections appear anywhere in this document. Where data carries material uncertainty, I say so explicitly and identify the uncertainty's source.

2.1 Institutional Architecture

Project Acacia is a joint initiative between the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre. The RBA is Australia's central bank, responsible for monetary policy, financial system stability, and payments system regulation. The DFCRC is a government-supported research cooperative established specifically to advance digital finance capability in Australia.

The project represents the second major CBDC research collaboration between these institutions, following the 2022 to 2023 CBDC Pilot Project, which demonstrated industry interest in asset tokenisation and the potential for CBDC to support atomic settlement in wholesale markets (RBA and DFCRC, 2023). Project Acacia extends that foundational work into real-money experimentation across a broader set of asset classes and infrastructure platforms.

The full Council of Financial Regulators supported Project Acacia: ASIC provided formal regulatory relief to participants (ASIC, 2025, Media Release 25-129MR), APRA maintained prudential oversight, and the Australian Treasury participated in the policy advisory group. This multi-regulator architecture means the selection criteria for Project Acacia were not determined by a single technical mandate but by a coordinated policy apparatus requiring use cases and their supporting infrastructure to satisfy legal, prudential, securities, and monetary stability considerations simultaneously.

2.2 Project Timeline

2.3 Scale of Participation

Twenty use cases were developed and tested under real-money conditions. Asset classes covered included fixed income securities, managed funds, repurchase agreements (repos), asset-backed securities, private market instruments, carbon credits, and trade payables. The DFCRC's published list of conditionally selected use cases (DFCRC, 2025) confirmed participation from Australian and international financial institutions including ANZ, Banking Circle Australia, Cuscal, Fireblocks, Australian Payments Plus, and multiple fintech and legal firms. The breadth of participation establishes Project Acacia as the most institutionally comprehensive CBDC experimentation program conducted in Australia to date.

I synthesised the following six criteria from three primary sources: the RBA and DFCRC Project Acacia Consultation Paper (November 2024), the Final Report (May 2026), and the BIS CPMI-IOSCO Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (BIS, 2021). These criteria form the complete basis of the comparative scoring methodology in Section 5. Each is defined with reference to the specific requirements of wholesale CBDC settlement infrastructure.

Criterion 1: Settlement Finality

The BIS defines settlement finality as the unconditional and irrevocable transfer of an asset or financial instrument (BIS, 2021, Principle 8). For CBDC settlement infrastructure, this means that once a transaction is confirmed by the network, it cannot be reversed, revoked, or reorganised under any circumstances. Probabilistic finality systems, where confirmation confidence increases over time but irreversibility is never mathematically guaranteed, do not meet this standard by definition. Deterministic finality systems, built on Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocols, do meet it.

This is the most heavily weighted criterion (25%) because it is binary in practice: infrastructure either delivers deterministic finality or it does not. Central banks accept no ambiguity on this point.

Criterion 2: Compliance and Identity Management

Every Project Acacia participant operated under existing Australian regulatory and legal obligations, including KYC, AML, and investor protection requirements (Redbelly Network, 2025). A DLT platform hosting wCBDC must enforce participant eligibility at the protocol layer, not merely at an application layer that can be circumvented. This means the identity verification and access control architecture must be native to the consensus and execution layer, not bolted on through third-party APIs.

Criterion 3: Fault Tolerance and Security

The integrity of central bank money depends on the robustness of the network carrying it. A CBDC-hosting blockchain must be provably resilient to Byzantine faults (malicious actor behaviour), network partitions, and coordinated denial of service attacks. The Stabl paper (Gramoli et al., 2025, arXiv:2409.13142) provides the only published peer-reviewed comparative analysis of this criterion across major blockchains and forms the primary evidential basis for scoring in this category.

Criterion 4: Privacy Architecture

Wholesale financial markets require that transaction details be accessible only to authorised counterparties. Public blockchains present a structural tension: their transparency is a trust mechanism, but commercial sensitivity requires confidentiality. Resolving this tension technically, rather than by retreating to private networks, is a prerequisite for a public blockchain to serve in regulated wholesale finance. Zero-knowledge proof implementations and selective disclosure mechanisms are the principal technical approaches.

Criterion 5: Throughput and Latency

Wholesale markets generate transaction volumes that retail blockchain infrastructure cannot support. The Australian Securities Exchange processes approximately 500,000 to 1 million equity transactions per day under normal conditions. Settlement infrastructure must sustain real-world institutional transaction rates with low latency to deliver meaningful efficiency gains over existing systems. Independent, verifiable benchmark data is required for credible scoring in this category.

Criterion 6: Legal Embedding and Programmability

Settlement of tokenised securities involves contractual obligations including trustee duties, investor protections, and servicer arrangements. A platform that can embed legally enforceable logic directly into the settlement layer reduces reconciliation requirements, legal ambiguity, and operational risk. This criterion is weighted at 5% because, while meaningful, it is subordinate to the infrastructure integrity criteria above.

4.1 DBFT Consensus and Deterministic Finality

Redbelly's Democratic Byzantine Fault Tolerant (DBFT) consensus algorithm was first published at the 17th IEEE Symposium on Network Computing and Applications in 2018 (Crain, Gramoli, Larrea, and Raynal, 2018) and formally established in the peer-reviewed paper 'Red Belly: A Secure, Fair and Scalable Open Blockchain' at the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Crain, Natoli, and Gramoli, 2021). The algorithm is formally verified through parameterised model checking, a rigorous mathematical proof technique demonstrating correct operation across all possible execution paths and for any system size (Gramoli et al., 2025, arXiv:2409.13142).

DBFT is leaderless. No single node controls transaction ordering or block proposal. This eliminates leader-based single points of failure that affect Practical BFT variants and most current BFT-PoS implementations. The algorithm assumes partial synchrony, is resilience-optimal (tolerating the maximum possible fraction of faulty nodes for its class), and terminates in four message delays on its fast path. Redbelly's superblock optimisation combines proposals from all governor nodes into a single block per consensus round, enabling throughput to scale linearly with node count (vine.redbelly.network/consensus).

Finality is deterministic. Every confirmed transaction is irreversible with mathematical certainty, satisfying the BIS's settlement finality requirement without qualification.

4.2 Verified Performance Benchmarks

Independent testing by Chainspect in March 2025 confirmed the following results for Redbelly Network, reported as the highest figures in Chainspect's global database at the time of publication (Redbelly Network, 2025, May):

The Stabl paper (Gramoli, Guerraoui, Lebedev, and Voron, 2025, ACM/IFIP Middleware Conference, Nashville) compared Redbelly against Solana, Algorand, Avalanche, and Aptos using the sensitivity score, a metric measuring both the amplitude and duration of performance degradation under failure conditions (arXiv:2409.13142). The paper states explicitly: 'Redbelly does not show the sign of oscillation of Aptos. As confirmed by previous results, this is due to DBFT being less impacted than HotStuff-like protocols (including DiemBFT) when their leader crashes.' Redbelly was the only system that continued processing transactions when individual nodes were isolated by network partitions. The paper received Best Student Paper Award at the conference.

4.3 Receptor: Identity and Compliance at Protocol Layer

Receptor is Redbelly's native digital identity and verifiable credential system, built on the W3C Verifiable Credential data model (docs.redbelly.network/pages/receptor). It comprises three modules: Issuer (issues credentials to participants), Holder (manages user-side credential storage and presentation), and Verifier (defines and enforces eligibility criteria at the smart contract execution level). Credential checking is enforced at the protocol layer, not at an application layer, meaning smart contracts on Redbelly can require verified credential presentation as a condition of transaction execution.

Receptor supports two proof methods: Proof by Query performs on-chain eligibility checks against credential status registers; Selective Disclosure uses zero-knowledge proofs for off-chain credential verification, allowing a participant to prove they hold a valid credential without revealing the credential's contents to the verifying party or to the public ledger. Only entities accredited through the Receptor Accredited Issuer registry (vine.redbelly.network/identity/accredited-issuers) can issue credentials with network access effects.

4.4 Zero-Knowledge Privacy Architecture

The Project Acacia use case Redbelly supported explicitly utilised ZKP technology to enable confidentiality within the public blockchain environment. The DFCRC's published use case summary for the NotCentralised Smart ABS Pilot states that all tokenised assets, collateral, and money transacted on Redbelly Network utilised ZKP to enable confidentiality (DFCRC, 2025, Use Case Summary). This is one of the few documented instances of ZKP-enabled confidentiality being deployed in a central bank digital currency pilot on any public network globally.

4.5 Ricardian Contracts for Legal Embedding

Redbelly's architecture supports Ricardian contracts: smart contracts in which the legal agreement governing the transaction is embedded directly in the contract code, creating a unified legal and computational record. This capability was directly exercised in the Smart ABS Pilot, where the securitisation structure's payment waterfall, investor protections, and trustee obligations were encoded as on-chain logic and executed by AMAL Trustees in their fiduciary capacity (Redbelly Network, 2025, December Blog; Security Brief Australia, 2026).

4.6 Gas Fee Stability

Redbelly's gas model fixes transaction costs in US dollar terms through a distributed on-chain price oracle that reads a live USD/RBNT exchange rate at block execution time, adjusting the RBNT quantity deducted to maintain a stable dollar-denominated fee. A simple native transfer costs USD 0.01 (21,000 gas at USD 0.000000476190476190 per gas unit). The oracle is Byzantine fault tolerant, tolerating up to t malicious data sources. (vine.redbelly.network/network-fees)

For central bank applications, fee predictability is operationally significant. Volatile gas markets on general-purpose chains make it impossible to model operating costs with precision, a requirement that both regulatory compliance and financial modelling demand.

5.1 Scoring Methodology

I assess all four named Project Acacia DLT platforms against the six criteria defined in Section 3 using a weighted scoring scale. Each criterion is scored from 1 to 5, where 1 represents substantial deficiency relative to central bank requirements and 5 represents full documented compliance. Scores are weighted by relevance to the Project Acacia mandate: hosting wCBDC for wholesale tokenised asset settlement on infrastructure that preserves regulatory obligations.

5.2 Scored Results

Direct wCBDC issuance on public network

5.3 Comparative Observations

The scoring differential between Redbelly and the other three platforms reflects a structural distinction, not an incremental technical gap. Hedera, R3 Corda, and Canvas Connect each operated in private or private-permissioned configurations for the Project Acacia pilot. Their participation is technically valid and each provides genuine value for specific use cases. However, none of them challenges the conventional assumption that wholesale CBDC settlement belongs on private infrastructure. Redbelly's participation as a fully public network directly challenges that assumption.

R3 Corda achieves strong scores on identity and legal embedding because its CorDapp framework has been commercially deployed in regulated finance since 2016 and has accumulated an evidence base of regulatory acceptance that Redbelly's newer commercial track record does not yet match in depth. However, Corda's private network architecture means it cannot serve the specific public-blockchain CBDC hosting objective that Project Acacia was designed to test, removing it from direct competition with Redbelly on the most significant criterion.

Hedera's HashSphere deployment requires Australian Payments Plus to operate a bespoke private network on Hedera technology to meet Project Acacia's requirements. This means that Hedera's public network itself was not considered suitable for the wCBDC hosting function without a private wrapper. The public Hedera network's consensus is formally described by Hashgraph as asynchronous BFT, which provides strong guarantees, but HashSphere as a separate private deployment has not been independently benchmarked under the same methodology as Redbelly.

Canvas Connect's lower score reflects limited published technical documentation available for independent scoring. Its EVM heritage means inherited probabilistic finality characteristics that the private network configuration partially mitigates but does not fully resolve at the protocol level.

6.1 Consortium and Asset Structure

The Smart ABS Pilot was formally launched on 11 December 2025 (Redbelly Network, 2025, December Blog). The consortium comprised: NotCentralised (lead structurer and financial engineer), Redbelly Network (blockchain infrastructure), Fireblocks (institutional custody and key management infrastructure), the Australian Bond Exchange (on-chain trading venue), AMAL Trustees as part of IQ-EQ (securitisation trustee and fiduciary services), Fasanara Capital (institutional investor), and Wisr Limited (ASX: WZR, as receivables originator and servicer).

The underlying reference asset was the Wisr Freedom Trust 2025-1, an AUD 250 million structured investment trust backed by a pool of personal loans originated by Wisr. The digital twin constructed by the consortium mirrored the economics and legal structure of this existing trust in a tokenised format on the Redbelly Mainnet (redbelly.routescan.io).

6.2 The Four-Stage On-Chain Lifecycle

6.3 The Significance of Atomic wCBDC Settlement

Traditional Australian ABS settlement involves CHESS (Clearing House Electronic Subregister System), SWIFT messaging, and multiple custodian and trustee reconciliations over T+2 or longer settlement cycles. Each leg introduces counterparty risk: the possibility that one party fails to deliver in the window before the other party's obligation is confirmed. Atomic settlement eliminates this risk by design: either both legs execute simultaneously or neither does.

Using wCBDC as the settlement asset rather than a commercial bank deposit or stablecoin adds a further dimension. wCBDC is a direct liability of the central bank, carrying zero commercial bank counterparty risk. When the RBA issues wCBDC to settle a securitisation trade on Redbelly, the settlement asset is as secure as the central bank's own balance sheet. The Project Acacia Final Report confirmed that wCBDC enabled true atomic settlement when co-located with tokenised assets (RBA and DFCRC, 2026).

The combination of on-chain securitisation logic, ZKP-enabled investor eligibility, Ricardian trustee obligations, and wCBDC settlement in a single atomic transaction on a public blockchain has no documented precedent before this pilot. I am not aware of any other jurisdiction that has produced an equivalent proof-of-concept as of the publication date of this report.

7.1 Australia

The Project Acacia Final Report (May 2026) establishes a clear post-pilot policy roadmap. The RBA is exploring a Digital Financial Market Infrastructure (DFMI) regulatory sandbox to provide a structured pathway from experimentation to commercialisation. This sandbox would allow regulators to identify risks, determine whether new or amended regulation is required, and provide industry with a supervised environment for scaling tokenised asset infrastructure (RBA and DFCRC, 2026; DFCRC, 2025, IAG meeting notes).

For Redbelly specifically, the ASIC regulatory relief instrument registered for Project Acacia participants established a compliance-conditioned precedent for operating a public blockchain within Australian securities law. ASIC's relief supported responsible testing of tokenised asset transactions, consistent with relief provided to participants in earlier digital money projects (ASIC, 2025, Media Release 25-129MR). The Receptor protocol's enforcement of participant eligibility at the protocol layer is structurally consistent with ASIC's requirements for responsible participant management in digital asset markets.

APRA's prudential oversight of bank capital treatment for digital asset exposures remains an active regulatory question. The Project Acacia evidence base directly informs APRA's consultations on this matter, particularly the demonstration that wCBDC settlement on a public blockchain can be conducted within existing prudential frameworks without requiring new primary legislation.

DFCRC estimates AUD 24 billion in annual economic gains for Australia from digital finance innovation (RBA and DFCRC, 2026). If the post-Acacia program converts even a fraction of this opportunity into commercialised activity, the infrastructure providers that demonstrated reliable performance in Phase 2 experimentation will be advantaged in the subsequent deployment phase.

7.2 European Union

The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114) came into full effect for Crypto-Asset Service Providers on 30 December 2024, establishing the first unified EU-wide framework for crypto-asset issuance and service provision (European Commission, 2023). MiCA's classification of tokenised assets into Asset-Referenced Tokens (ARTs) and Electronic Money Tokens (EMTs) creates compliance obligations that infrastructure providers must satisfy at the protocol level, not merely through contractual arrangements.

Redbelly's architecture maps naturally onto the MiCA compliance framework for three reasons. First, Receptor's W3C Verifiable Credential infrastructure provides the on-chain evidence of participant eligibility that MiCA's KYC and AML obligations require for ART issuers. Second, Ricardian contracts provide the legally enforceable on-chain documentation that MiCA's whitepaper and governance disclosure requirements mandate, as a computational record rather than an off-chain PDF. Third, ZKP selective disclosure satisfies MiCA's privacy requirements for personal data handling under GDPR, a compliance intersection that most blockchain implementations handle inadequately.

The European Central Bank's Appia initiative, planning DLT integration for EU capital markets settlement infrastructure, represents a potential European parallel to Project Acacia. Redbelly's documented Project Acacia performance constitutes a directly applicable evidence base for any Appia-adjacent evaluation process.

7.3 United States

The US GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, S.1582, 119th Congress), signed into law on 18 July 2025, creates a federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins, mandating 1:1 reserve backing, monthly audit requirements, and issuer financial integrity obligations (Gibson Dunn, 2025). While the GENIUS Act focuses on stablecoins rather than CBDC, it has direct implications for the infrastructure that will settle tokenised assets in the United States. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's proposed rulemaking to implement the GENIUS Act clarified that banks may hold stablecoins and reserves in custody, use distributed ledger technology, and issue tokenised deposits.

US Treasury Secretary Bessent cited projections of USD 3.7 trillion in stablecoin market growth by 2030 (Brookings Institution, 2026). The GENIUS Act's compliance requirements around reserve audits, governance disclosure, and custodian non-commingling are technically implementable on Redbelly's infrastructure through Receptor's on-chain identity backbone and the distributed price oracle architecture, in ways they are not on most general-purpose chains that lack protocol-native KYC enforcement.

The US CLARITY Act (Commodity Layer And Regulatory Improvements for Technology Act), under development as of June 2026, proposes to clarify the division of SEC and CFTC oversight for digital assets. Clarity on this jurisdictional boundary would reduce the primary legal uncertainty currently preventing US institutional capital from committing to tokenised asset infrastructure at scale. Redbelly's compliance-native architecture is designed for precisely the regulatory environment that CLARITY is moving toward.

8.1 Primary Conclusions

1. Redbelly Network's selection as the sole public, permissionless blockchain for wCBDC issuance in Project Acacia is technically justified by evidence that meets the standard a central bank technology officer would apply. DBFT's formally verified deterministic finality, Chainspect-confirmed 0-second latency, and Stabl-documented fault resilience under isolated node conditions directly satisfy the central bank infrastructure criteria that probabilistic finality systems cannot meet.

2. The Smart ABS Pilot constitutes a documented proof-of-concept for fully on-chain ABS securitisation with wCBDC settlement on a public network. The pilot executed a four-stage lifecycle (receivables tokenisation, smart contract securitisation, ZKP-gated investor access, and atomic DvP settlement) that has no prior published equivalent from any government-supervised pilot globally.

3. The ZKP selective disclosure implementation on Redbelly's public network directly refutes the conventional assumption that transparency and institutional confidentiality are irreconcilable on public blockchains. The Project Acacia use case is the empirical evidence for this rebuttal.

4. The comparative analysis in Section 5 demonstrates that Redbelly's architecture scores 5.00 out of 5.00 against central bank infrastructure criteria weighted by relevance to the Project Acacia mandate, compared to 3.40 for Hedera HashSphere, 3.50 for R3 Corda, and 2.60 for Canvas Connect. This differential is structural rather than marginal.

5. Regulatory tailwinds across Australia (DFMI sandbox), the EU (MiCA, Appia), and the United States (GENIUS Act, CLARITY Act) are converging to create a compliance-premium market in which infrastructure with protocol-native KYC, formally verified consensus, and demonstrated CBDC integration will command a durable selection advantage in future capital markets technology procurement decisions.

8.2 Recommendations

1. For institutional asset issuers: The Smart ABS Pilot's architecture is directly replicable for trade receivables, private credit, and commercial mortgage-backed securitisation across Australian, EU, and US jurisdictions. Engaging with Redbelly's accredited issuer program (vine.redbelly.network/identity/accredited-issuers) provides access to the only publicly validated proof-of-concept infrastructure for this architecture currently available in the market.

2. For regulators and central banks outside Australia: The Project Acacia Final Report (RBA and DFCRC, 2026) and the DFCRC use case summary (DFCRC, 2025) constitute the primary evidence base for evaluating whether a public blockchain meets wCBDC hosting requirements. These documents should be referenced directly in any analogous domestic evaluation process rather than relying on secondary analysis.

3. For DeFi researchers and ecosystem analysts: Redbelly's absence from DeFiLlama and RWA.xyz creates a significant visibility gap between the protocol's verified institutional standing and its recognition in the data infrastructure that DeFi capital allocation decisions depend on. The staking contract address confirmed at vine.redbelly.network/nodes/staking (0x818c3c113Ce240Ac92508f52F3DdDA675E6b6B9A, Mainnet) provides the on-chain anchor for a DeFiLlama TVL adapter that can close this gap through a verifiable, automated data pipeline.

4. For the Redbelly development team: The post-Acacia program outlined by the RBA, including the DFMI sandbox and tokenised government bond initiative, represents a direct commercial pipeline for infrastructure providers that demonstrated reliable Phase 2 performance. Sustained engagement with the expanded Industry Advisory Group that the RBA is establishing is the appropriate institutional follow-through on the Project Acacia selection.

Primary Government and Regulatory Sources

ASIC. (2025, July 10). Media Release 25-129MR: Project Acacia — RBA and DFCRC announce chosen industry participants and ASIC provides regulatory relief. Australian Securities and Investments Commission. https://www.asic.gov.au/about-asic/news-centre/find-a-media-release/2025-releases/25-129mr

RBA. (2025, July 10). Media Release MR-25-18: Project Acacia — Participants selected for testing. Reserve Bank of Australia. https://www.rba.gov.au/media-releases/2025/mr-25-18.html

RBA. (2026, May 19). Media Release MR-26-13: RBA and DFCRC release findings from Project Acacia. Reserve Bank of Australia. https://www.rba.gov.au/media-releases/2026/mr-26-13.html

RBA and DFCRC. (2023). Australian CBDC Pilot for Digital Finance Innovation: Project Report. Reserve Bank of Australia and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre.

RBA and DFCRC. (2024, November). Project Acacia: Consultation Paper (ISBN 978-1-7637270-0-7). Reserve Bank of Australia and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre. https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/central-bank-digital-currency/pdf/project-acacia-consultation-paper-2024-11.pdf

RBA and DFCRC. (2026, May). Project Acacia: Final Report (ISBN 978-1-7645772-2-9). Reserve Bank of Australia and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre. https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/central-bank-digital-currency/pdf/project-acacia-final-report.pdf

US Congress. (2025). S.1582: Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act), 119th Congress. Signed into law 18 July 2025.

European Commission. (2023). Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 on Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA). Official Journal of the European Union.

Peer-Reviewed and Academic Sources

Crain, T., Gramoli, V., Larrea, M., and Raynal, M. (2018). DBFT: Efficient leaderless Byzantine consensus and its application to blockchains. Proceedings of the 17th IEEE Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA 2018), pp. 1-8. IEEE.

Crain, T., Natoli, C., and Gramoli, V. (2021). Red Belly: A secure, fair and scalable open blockchain. Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2021), pp. 1501-1518.

Gramoli, V., Guerraoui, R., Lebedev, A., and Voron, G. (2025). Stabl: The sensitivity of blockchains to failures. Proceedings of the 26th ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2025), Nashville, TN, USA, December 15-19. Best Student Paper Award. arXiv:2409.13142. https://gramoli.github.io/pubs/2025-Middleware-Stabl.pdf

Gramoli, V., Guerraoui, R., Lebedev, A., and Voron, G. (2025). Evaluating blockchain fault tolerance with Stabl. 55th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks Supplemental Volume (DSN-S 2025). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393536891

BIS CPMI-IOSCO. (2021). Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMI). Bank for International Settlements.

BIS. (2024, October). Tokenisation in the context of money and other assets: Concepts and implications for central banks. Report to the G20. Bank for International Settlements.

Official Redbelly Documentation

Redbelly Network. (2024, November). Redbelly Network Whitepaper. https://redbelly.network/redbelly-network-whitepaper.pdf

Redbelly Network. (n.d.). Consensus: DBFT. Vine Developer Portal. https://vine.redbelly.network/consensus

Redbelly Network. (n.d.). Network fees. Vine Developer Portal. https://vine.redbelly.network/network-fees

Redbelly Network. (n.d.). Network fees: Distribution. Vine Developer Portal. https://vine.redbelly.network/network-fees/distribution

Redbelly Network. (n.d.). Nodes: Staking. Vine Developer Portal. https://vine.redbelly.network/nds-staking [Staking contract Mainnet: 0x818c3c113Ce240Ac92508f52F3DdDA675E6b6B9A]

Redbelly Network. (n.d.). Nodes: Rewards and incentives. Vine Developer Portal. https://vine.redbelly.network/nds-node-operator-rewards-and-incentives

Redbelly Network. (n.d.). Environments. Vine Developer Portal. https://vine.redbelly.network/environments

Redbelly Network. (n.d.). Receptor. Technical Documentation. https://docs.redbelly.network/pages/receptor

Redbelly Network. (n.d.). Mainnet block explorer. https://redbelly.routescan.io

Redbelly Network. (2025, December 11). Tokenised asset-backed security transaction pilot launches under Project Acacia. https://redbelly.network/blog/tokenised-asset-backed-security-transaction-pilot-launches-under-Project-Acacia

Redbelly Network. (2025, August). Month in review: July 2025. Medium. https://medium.com/@redbellyblockchain/redbelly-network-month-in-review-july-2025-2412b13b1e22

Redbelly Network. (2025, August). Regulatory-compliant, yet crypto-native: How Project Acacia bridges two worlds. Medium. https://medium.com/@redbellyblockchain/regulatory-compliant-yet-crypto-native-how-project-acacia-bridges-two-worlds-49c4ccb4ce3c

Redbelly Network. (2025, May). Chainspect roundup: Redbelly Network confirmed as world's fastest blockchain. Medium. https://medium.com/@redbellyblockchain/chainspect-roundup-redbelly-network-confirmed-as-worlds-fastest-blockchain-6c6602254853

Redbelly Network. (2026, January). Year in review 2025. Medium. https://medium.com/@redbellyblockchain/redbelly-network-year-in-review-2025-4cca70e3146d

Industry and Secondary Sources

DFCRC. (2025). Project Acacia: Summary of conditionally selected use cases. Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre. https://dfcrc.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Project-Acacia-summary-of-use-cases.pdf

DFCRC. (2025, July 10). Project Acacia: RBA and DFCRC announce chosen industry participants. https://dfcrc.com.au/2025/07/10/projectacaciaparticipantsselected/

DFCRC. (2025-2026). Project Acacia Industry Advisory Group meeting notes (Meetings 1-11). https://dfcrc.com.au/projects-cbdc-acacia/

Fireblocks. (2025, July 10). Fireblocks joins Project Acacia to explore the role of digital money in wholesale tokenised asset markets. PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fireblocks-joins-project-acacia-302501537.html

Genfinity. (2026, May 26). Project Acacia final report maps Australia's path to tokenised wholesale finance. https://genfinity.io/2026/05/26/project-acacia-final-report-rba-dfcrc-tokenised-finance/

Gibson Dunn. (2025). The GENIUS Act: A new era of stablecoin regulation. https://www.gibsondunn.com/the-genius-act-a-new-era-of-stablecoin-regulation/

Brookings Institution. (2026, March). Next steps for GENIUS payment stablecoins. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/next-steps-for-genius-payment-stablecoins/

Hashgraph. (2026). Project Acacia: Case study. https://hashgraph.com/case-study/project-acacia/

Security Brief Australia. (2026, January 8). Wisr joins tokenised ABS pilot under Project Acacia. https://securitybrief.com.au/story/wisr-joins-tokenised-abs-pilot-under-project-acacia

CoinPaprika. (2026, May). RBA and DFCRC release findings on Project Acacia trials. https://coinpaprika.com/news/rba-dfcrc-project-acacia-findings/

Analyst: @ce_omarquess | June 2026 | All claims cite primary, peer-reviewed, or official government sources