The Reserve Bank of Australia published media release 2026-24 on 3 September 2026. It carries two documents that pull in opposite directions. The first, written with the Australian Treasury, rules out, for now, a central bank digital currency for the general public, for want of a clear public interest case. The second opens a consultation, running to 30 October, on the role of RITS, Australia’s real-time gross settlement system, in a tokenised ecosystem.
A retail central bank digital currency would be a tokenised form of money issued by the central bank and usable by households for everyday payments. It would sit alongside banknotes rather than replace them. Australians hold most of their money as deposits, which are a claim on a commercial bank. The 2024 assessment stands, and the RBA says it will revisit the case should circumstances and the policy case change.
What 239 Australians said
The conclusion rests first on direct public engagement, run by Verian, an independent research agency. It held 33 focus groups with 239 participants between February and July 2026, in metropolitan, regional and remote locations across every state and territory. Dedicated sessions reached groups that are rarely consulted, among them Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Participants struggled to tell the new money apart from what they already use, and to name a personal benefit. Many treated one more payment method as a burden. Among those with firm views, opposition ran ahead of support: “definitely not for me” came up more than twice as often as “I would love it”.
Cash stops retreating
A related argument turns on public access to central bank money in digital form as banknotes retreat. The RBA’s latest Consumer Payments Survey measures the opposite. In 2025, 50 per cent of Australians reported using cash at least once a week, against 47 per cent in 2022, and cash accounted for 15 per cent of payments by number, against 13 per cent in 2022.
The second standard argument concerns monetary sovereignty. The 2024 assessment set out three substitution scenarios: persistently high inflation, superior payment functionality from a foreign monetary system, and a commercial platform whose use required a tokenised money in a foreign currency. The RBA sees substitution mostly in emerging economies where confidence in the domestic currency is low. It treats the third scenario as the most plausible of the three in the years ahead, while judging that a retail CBDC could be of limited effectiveness against it.
| Consideration | 2024 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Unmet payment needs | Public engagement to be done | The system meets the needs |
| Monetary sovereignty | Risks too small to warrant issuance | No evidence of substitution in Australia |
| Cash use | At record lows after years of decline | Stabilised |
RITS, wholesale settlement and tokenised money
RITS, the Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System, settles interbank obligations from high-value payments and financial market transactions in central bank money, across the accounts institutions hold at the RBA, the Exchange Settlement Accounts. The consultation is one of the eleven initiatives in the Project Acacia final report, the tokenisation experiment delivered in May 2026 with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre. The consultation paper puts four topics out for comment.
- Synchronising tokenised asset platforms with RITS and the Fast Settlement Service, for delivery-versus-payment settlement.
- At-par exchange between tokenised private money issued by different institutions.
- Access for stablecoin issuers to central bank reserves.
- The design of tokenised reserves, from issuance through to liquidity management.
The paper sets out three routes to delivery versus payment. An asset lock freezes the security on its platform while the cash leg settles in RITS. A reserves lock works the other way round and already runs in production, since the e-conveyancing platforms PEXA and Sympli submit a reservation batch to RITS that locks the paying banks’ funds before registration at the land registry. The third model locks both legs.
The reserve segregation problem
The hardest question concerns stablecoins. Authorised deposit-taking institutions may apply for a settlement account, while stablecoin issuers that are not authorised deposit-taking institutions generally may not. Forte, a non-authorised issuer of the AUDF stablecoin, worked around the obstacle during Project Acacia by depositing funds with an authorised institution that held matching balances in its settlement account under a private contract. The RBA notes that such an arrangement would give no clear legal or operational separation between the assets backing the stablecoin and the institution’s other holdings in that account. An account holder acts as principal, not as agent or trustee, so the end customer holds no direct claim on the central bank.
The report closes by placing the Australian position among those of other central banks. The Bank of Canada, Norges Bank and the South African Reserve Bank have recently de-prioritised their retail CBDC research in favour of wholesale CBDC or broader payments work. The euro area remains the advanced economy furthest down the road, but its motives stem from its own geography: fragmentation of payment systems across countries and reliance on foreign payment providers. The RBA notes that Australia has neither. Its payment arrangements are harmonised across states and served by a competitive mix of domestic and foreign providers.