As announced by The Reserve Bank of Australia, the RBA on November 2, the financial institution will work with the Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, the financial services company Perpetual and the software company ConsenSys on a project to explore the use of the central bank's wholesale digital currency in the country using "Ethereum-based distributed ledger technology.
The RBA stated that it will investigate the development of the concept of "issuing a token form of CBDC". It specifically mentioned wholesale market participants potentially using the digital currency for tokenized syndicated loans on an DLT platform and exploring the implications of delivery-versus-payment security settlements with cross-chain atomic swaps.
This move is part of the ongoing RBA discussion on CBDC policy. On October 14th, the head of payment policy in the RBA said that the bank will continue its research on the CBDC, even though the financial institution stated that there are no strong arguments in favour of issuing it in September.
As an alternative to issuing the CBDC, the bank pointed to the success of an efficient platform for new payments in real time and declared its willingness to provide access to banknotes "as long as Australians want to continue using them.
The central bank announced that the project will be completed by the end of the year and will issue a report in 2021.
