Op-Ed: Australia’s AU$19B Tokenisation Gamble Needs Open Rails

Australia’s Project Acacia is a bold stress test of digital finance. Canberra has cleared fourteen institutions, among them the ANZ, CBA, and Westpac, to move real money across tokenised bonds, private-market funds, and even a wholesale central-bank digital currency (CBDC). 

Officials tout an annual upside of AU$19 billion, but that upside hinges on a single design choice: whether the rails remain open and interoperable or become fenced inside permissioned blockchains.

Permissioned Walls Shrink the Opportunity

Closed ledgers may reassure compliance teams, but they reintroduce the gatekeeping that blockchain was designed to eliminate. Permissioned networks restrict transaction validation and smart contract deployment to pre-approved participants, reducing innovation to the speed of committee decisions. New entrants, whether start-ups or rural co-ops, must ask permission to compete.

Worse, data silos fragment liquidity. A tokenised carbon credit on one consortium chain cannot natively trade against a tokenised bond on another. This forces costly bridges or off-chain workarounds that undermine the very efficiencies Project Acacia is meant to demonstrate.

Lessons from Open Ecosystems Abroad

Europe offers a live counter-example. Under the EU’s MiCA regime and sandbox exemptions, firms are issuing tokenised commercial paper and structured notes directly on public EVM-compatible chains. Compliance is enforced not at the token level alone, but across the full stack: smart contract logic, settlement infrastructure, KYC-linked registries, and regulated orchestration frameworks.

These programmes rely on open, chain-agnostic standards that interoperate with token primitives like ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155, while enabling additional control logic as needed. EIP 7943, the latest proposed standard for real-world asset tokenisation, extends this model by defining a modular compliance architecture. It cleanly separates token mechanics from proprietary infrastructure, preserving legal neutrality and enabling cross-chain interoperability.

Regulation should define outcomes, not enforce architecture. Issuers must be free to adopt infrastructure that satisfies compliance requirements without being bound to a specific protocol, vendor, or permissioned system. Design-layer flexibility is essential to unlock scalable, cross-border capital formation.

Related: Australia’s Crypto Moment: Why AUD Stablecoins Matter

SMEs Need Unrestricted Rails

Australia’s digital asset roadmap risks reinforcing incumbent advantage at the moment small businesses could benefit most. Tokenisation enables farm cooperatives to fractionalise grain receivables, property developers to pre-sell equity tranches, renewable energy start-ups to securitise future cash flows, and Indigenous community trusts to unlock dormant land value.

These issuers do not have the lobbying power to join a bank-led consortium chain. On permissionless infrastructure, however, smart contract tooling and wallet abstraction make capital formation nearly as accessible as launching an online storefront. Regulatory safeguards such as transfer restrictions and investor limits can still be enforced at the token or protocol layer without centralised gatekeepers.

Open Standards Instead of Bespoke Pipes

The path forward is clear: adopt a standards-first approach that treats the ledger as a modular, interchangeable component. A baseline real-world asset (RWA) token standard enables any licensed entity to build atop a shared compliance layer without fragmenting liquidity or duplicating infrastructure.

Consortia may still operate private sub-networks for sensitive workflows, but final settlement and secondary trading should occur on public, auditable infrastructure accessible to all qualified participants. Open rails reduce systemic friction and ensure that access is governed by compliance, not gatekeeping.

 

Making Australia Globally Competitive

Project Acacia’s six-month pilot should therefore measure success against four criteria:

1. Interoperability by default
2. RegTech integrated into the asset
3. SME access and on-ramps
4. Open, verifiable auditability

If these conditions are met, Australia can position itself to capture compounding global liquidity rather than watch it consolidate in jurisdictions like Singapore.

Critics argue that permissionless chains pose heightened risks of exploitation and illicit finance. But with smart contract audits, on-chain analytics, and zero-knowledge proofs already in production, these risks can be mitigated without sacrificing openness.

The greater threat is failing to allow network effects to emerge. On open infrastructure, every new issuer or liquidity pool strengthens the system. On permissioned networks, each participant adds governance overhead and requires bespoke integration, limiting scale by design.

Related: AFR: Carnegie Opens Crypto Gate for Super Funds and Family Offices

 

Choose Fibre, Not Copper

We’ve seen this movie before. When the National Broadband Network leapfrogged copper for fibre, it positioned Australia for a data-hungry century. Project Acacia now faces a similar crossroads. It can either enshrine yesterday’s financial hierarchies in digital form or set the global standard for an inclusive, interoperable marketplace. The AU$19 billion prize will go to the model that scales. History shows that the model is open.

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Edwin Mata, CEO & Co-Founder of Brickken

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This article reflects the author’s personal commentary and should be read as opinion.