Chainlink Drives Tokenized Finance in Australia With Westpac Institutional Bank and Imperium Markets

Westpac Institutional Bank and Imperium Markets are integrating Chainlink’s technology into Project Acacia, a joint effort led by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC). The collaboration marks a serious advance in real-world adoption of tokenized assets and blockchain-based settlement systems, with a clear focus on secure and compliant infrastructure.

Project Acacia aims to demonstrate Delivery versus Payment (DvP) settlement between tokenized assets and PayTo, Australia’s new domestic payment platform. This process is being enabled by the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE)—a decentralized orchestration layer that connects blockchain-based tokens with traditional payment systems in real time.

Project Acacia is guided by the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, a ten-year, AUD 180 million public-private initiative. The DFCRC aims to accelerate Australia’s digital transformation in capital markets by conducting applied research in areas like asset tokenization, CBDCs, and digital payments.

This collaboration between academia, government, and industry has helped put Australia at the forefront of tokenized finance. 

The partnership paves the way for how institutions can bring capital onchain while complying with strict regulatory requirements and maintaining compatibility with legacy systems.

Chainlink Powers Seamless DvP Settlement

Chainlink's CRE plays a key role in enabling DvP settlement across public blockchains and Australia’s domestic PayTo payment rails. For institutions, DvP ensures that delivery of assets and payment for them occur simultaneously, mitigating counterparty risk.

This system is now being applied to tokenized financial instruments, allowing large-scale transfers of capital and assets across systems that were once siloed. By automating the settlement process through blockchain and integrating it with the real-world payment network, the system creates efficiency, speed, and transparency.

The move reflects a rising institutional shift from outdated, manual clearing systems to blockchain-based settlement with guaranteed finality.

RBA Estimates Billions in Savings from Tokenization

The Reserve Bank of Australia has stated that tokenization could deliver cost savings of up to AUD 13 billion annually to asset issuers in local markets. This is a bold estimate that underscores how much inefficiency still exists in the current financial infrastructure.

By issuing assets as digital tokens on a blockchain and settling payments in real time, institutions avoid layers of intermediaries and administrative friction. This streamlining not only cuts costs but reduces operational risk and increases transparency—key benefits for regulators and investors alike.

Quantum Security Meets Financial Innovation

Beyond real-time payments, Westpac is also using Project Acacia to explore post-quantum cryptography. As quantum computing becomes a plausible threat to existing encryption standards, financial institutions are seeking ways to secure their systems against future vulnerabilities.

Westpac’s work in this area includes support from QuintessenceLabs, an Australian cybersecurity company specializing in quantum-safe encryption. Their algorithms are already in use across defense and enterprise sectors, and now, the bank is applying them in financial experiments under Project Acacia.

Imperium Markets and Chainlink Expand Onchain Integration

Imperium Markets, a platform focused on tokenized financial products, joins Chainlink and Westpac to demonstrate how regulated institutions can tokenize and transact seamlessly onchain. Their role in Project Acacia includes developing the technical layers that allow real-world asset trading to happen via blockchain interfaces—without losing the trust and compliance required by regulators.

This is one of the few projects globally where central banks, commercial banks, and blockchain infrastructure providers are working together at this depth. Chainlink’s involvement ensures data integrity, automation, and connectivity, while Imperium Markets provides domain expertise in financial markets.

A Foundation for Central Bank Digital Currencies

As a central bank-led project, Acacia serves as a live experiment in how a CBDC might operate in practice. Although the RBA has not yet committed to issuing a digital dollar, the project helps test core capabilities, such as risk-free settlement, system resilience, and interoperability with existing banking infrastructure.

Westpac, for its part, is using this opportunity to explore how a central bank-backed digital currency could support wholesale use cases, especially in areas like bond issuance, institutional lending, and asset custody.

Worth noting, just recently, Chainlink Labs and the Blockchain Association have launched a bold new campaign—“Tokenized in America”—to help the U.S. lead the charge in blockchain-based finance.

The campaign serves two key purposes:

• A research hub tracking how each U.S. state is advancing blockchain infrastructure.
• An advocacy platform pushing for wider adoption and smart regulation.

The goal is to map out where tokenization is gaining real traction across all 50 states—and to keep America at the forefront of this shift.