Australia Plots Next Step in Tokenized Bond Market Expansion

Australia’s central bank and financial regulators are laying the groundwork for a potential expansion of tokenized bond markets as policymakers seek to push the country’s wholesale financial system further into the digital era.

The Reserve Bank, alongside Australia’s corporate watchdog ASIC, the prudential regulator APRA, Treasury and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, outlined an 11-point program on Monday. It followed a yearlong industry experiment that found tokenized assets and digital settlement systems could improve the efficiency of wholesale markets.

Among the key initiatives is a plan to explore the issuance, trading and settlement of tokenized government bonds — one ...