Australia draft urges A2A systems to link with stablecoins

A draft account-to-account (A2A) payments vision recommends that Australian A2A systems support interoperability with stablecoins and other tokenized fiat. The paper says tokenized money is moving from experimentation to adoption and could require new settlement models for ledger-based value.

The draft was prepared by the Account-to-Account Payments Roundtable, which includes AusPayNet, Australian Payments Plus, the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Treasury. It identifies digital assets as an external force that could change how payments are initiated, authorized and managed.

The document states, “Tokenized forms of money, such as stablecoins and tokenized liabilities, are moving from experimentation to adoption,” and notes that ledger-based programmable value could enable continuous availability, more automated execution and new settlement approaches.

The draft recommends that A2A systems “may need to support secure interoperability between account-based money and tokenized representations of fiat currency” to allow reliable movement of funds between account ledgers and tokenized environments while maintaining trust and integrity. It frames tokenized money as a potential parallel value layer that payments planners should consider when designing domestic rails.

The authors warn that tokenization could introduce new risks. The paper highlights issues around accountability, legal liability, data use and system resilience that would need to be addressed if tokenized assets become widely used in everyday payments.

The consultation appears alongside other Australian work on tokenized money. In July 2025 the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre selected use cases for Project Acacia, a wholesale digital money project that explores settlement in tokenized asset markets. Proposed settlement assets for those use cases included stablecoins, bank deposit tokens, a pilot wholesale central bank digital currency and new approaches to using banks’ exchange settlement accounts at the RBA.

On March 25, Reserve Bank Assistant Governor Brad Jones told a conference that the next phase of financial system innovation requires moving beyond short-term pilots to longer-term staged environments where industry and regulators can test new technologies and adjust policy settings. He pointed to the interaction of a wholesale CBDC with bank deposit tokens and stablecoins, and the synchronization of tokenized asset ledgers with Australia’s settlement infrastructure as areas of interest.

Regulatory change is under consideration. The Treasury has proposed digital asset laws that would create two regulated financial products-digital asset platforms and tokenized custody platforms-and require them to hold an Australian Financial Services Licence. The draft A2A vision is part of a broader consultation asking industry and stakeholders to consider how legacy account-based systems could interoperate with tokenized forms of money and what changes to governance, legal frameworks and technical standards might be required if tokenized assets scale beyond pilot projects.