Developers post live apps, integrations, or demos.

Ecosystem Showcase & Launches

The Clearest Retail CBDC Decision of the Year Landed This Week. It Did Not Go to Stablecoins Either.

On 3 September the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Treasury published their updated assessment of a retail central bank digital currency.



The sentence everyone will quote is this one. The RBA and Treasury maintain that there is currently no clear public interest case for issuing a retail CBDC in Australia, reaffirming the assessment reached in the 2024 White Paper.



That will be read in this industry as a win. It is not, and the reason it is not is four pages later in the same document.


There has been no evidence of high adoption of tokenised private money, such as stablecoins, in Australia.

And, on the public consultation that informed the assessment, participants had limited awareness of tokenised money options like stablecoins and expressed little interest in using them for retail payments.

So the most consequential retail digital money decision published this year says two things at once. The central bank does not have a case to issue one. And the private alternative has no measurable retail traction in that market either.

Nobody won. Something else did, and it is worth naming precisely, because it is the same thing that keeps winning and almost nobody in this industry has priced it.





The existing system.

The RBA's own summary of its consultation is that participants were broadly indifferent to a retail CBDC, with the current payments system largely meeting the day-to-day payment needs of Australians.

Read the shape of that rather than the verdict. A retail CBDC is not a worse product than a bank transfer. It is a product answering a question that the people surveyed did not have. Australia has real-time payments through the New Payments Platform, high trust in the banking system, and a population that, on the RBA's account, could not identify what a new form of money would do for them that the current one does not.



That is not apathy. It is a functioning market clearing.

The evidence, and its limits, stated plainly



The consultation behind this was run by Verian Group for the RBA and reported on 31 August. Thirty-three focus groups, two hundred and thirty-nine people, February to July 2026. Twenty general community groups and thirteen targeted ones covering people with disability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, new migrants and small merchants.

That is a serious piece of qualitative work and it is not a poll. 
The report says so itself, and anyone citing it should repeat that: 
the sample was recruited for qualitative research, the results are not statistically representative, and they should not be generalised beyond the participants.

With that stated, the RBA's own summary of the numbers is worth having. Around thirty percent of participants were indifferent. Around forty percent liked the idea in principle, though the RBA adds that these views tended to reflect general openness to the concept rather than seeing an immediate or obvious need. And among those with strong views, more than twice as many said it was definitely not for them as said they would love it.



The finding that should worry a product person more than the headline

Here is the part of the consultation that is genuinely instructive, and it has nothing to do with central banks.



Participants were asked how beneficial offline payment capability would be, before and after the practical trade-offs were explained. Before, roughly half rated it very or hugely beneficial. After being told that funds would need to be preloaded, that balances would sit somewhere not earning anything, and that money could be lost with the device, that fell to about a third.

The feature did not change. Only the description of what it costs did.

Merchants went further. Small merchants in the study said any new payment system would need to integrate seamlessly with existing point-of-sale systems, accounting software and business processes, and that features alone were not sufficient to drive uptake if they introduced additional complexity or effort. Most said they would not be early adopters and would wait for evidence of broad uptake.

That is the most transferable finding in the document, and it applies to every payment product ever built, including ours. Enthusiasm measured before the trade-off is not demand. It is a description of the pitch.





One statistic in the paper cuts against almost every deck written about digital money in the last five years.

Cash use in Australia stopped falling and went back up. Fifty percent of Australians reported using cash at least once per week in 2025, up from forty-seven percent in 2022. Fifteen percent of payments by number were made in cash in 2025, against thirteen percent in 2022.

The instrument with no app, no yield, no programmability and no network effect gained share over three years.

The consultation explains why without much difficulty. Cash was valued as tangible, fee-free, instantly settled, and functional when power, internet or terminals are not. It is the only payment method in the stack whose availability does not depend on somebody else's uptime.



Nobody should build a strategy on that. Everybody should notice that the resilience argument, which this industry usually makes about itself, was made by focus groups about banknotes.

, and they are the parts worth reading twice.

The RBA writes that it is consulting industry to understand whether providing stablecoin issuers with access to central bank reserves could support uniformity of money in the event that stablecoin usage grows in the future. A central bank that sees no retail case is nevertheless asking whether the private instrument should be able to hold reserves at the central bank. Those are not contradictory positions. They are the two halves of the same view: not our product to issue, possibly our balance sheet to anchor.

And the paper states that the RBA's principal focus on new forms of money continues to be directed toward wholesale initiatives, where the potential benefits are larger, following Project Acacia which was delivered in May 2026.

So the door that closed was retail issuance by the central bank. The doors left open are wholesale settlement, and the question of what backs private tokenised money.





In the spring issue of The International Economy,

 Dante Disparte, who is Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy at Circle

, published the clearest version of the architectural case against CBDC-only monetary design. Central banks issue the unit of account, private institutions distribute it, regulators keep both honest, and no part of that formula requires the state to operate the retail rails. His line is that CBDCs may be instruments of domestic monetary administration while stablecoins are instruments of monetary reach.

It is a good argument and it is worth reading properly rather than through the fact that its author works for an issuer.

But set it against the RBA paper and notice what does not line up. The Australian assessment reaches the same conclusion about CBDCs and does not reach his conclusion about the alternative. It says there is no evidence of high adoption of stablecoins there, and it says its consultation found little interest in them for retail payments.

Both things can be true. The architectural case against a state-run retail rail can be correct, and the private tokenised alternative can still have no retail demand in a country whose existing rails are good. Reach is not the same claim as displacement, and Disparte is careful to argue reach. The industry quoting him is usually not.



What this actually means for anyone building 👀



Three things survive, and none of them is a talking point.

The first is that a good domestic rail is not displaced by a better technology, it is displaced by a problem it does not solve. Australia does not have that problem in retail. Plenty of places do, and the honest move is to say which ones and why rather than to claim a universal thesis. The RBA itself points at emerging markets where confidence in the domestic currency is low, and explicitly says those conditions are not relevant to the Australian context.

The second is that the strongest scenario in the RBA's own list is not monetary. Of the three routes to currency substitution it reaffirms, the one it calls more plausible in the years ahead is access to a commercial platform requiring a particular non-AUD tokenised money, driven by network effects and the commercial incentives of the platform provider. Then it adds the line worth keeping: in that scenario, the effectiveness of a retail CBDC as a mitigation tool may be limited. The pressure the central bank considers most likely is one it says its own product would not fix.

The third is the trade-off finding, and it is the cheapest lesson in the whole document. Measure interest after you have described the cost, not before. Half of the enthusiasm for offline payments evaporated on contact with preloading and loss risk, and it was the same feature both times.



Questions worth answering directly ⁉️

❓
No, and the wording matters. The RBA and Treasury state there is currently no clear public interest case for issuing one, reaffirming their 2024 assessment. The paper says explicitly that trends can evolve rapidly and that the need for new forms of central bank money may change in the future.



❓
Not in that market, on that document. The same paper states there has been no evidence of high adoption of tokenised private money such as stablecoins in Australia, and that consultation participants had limited awareness of them and little interest in using them for retail payments.



❓
It is a serious qualitative study and not a poll. Thirty-three focus groups and two hundred and thirty-nine participants, run by Verian Group and reported on 31 August. The report states that the sample is not statistically representative and should not be generalised beyond the participants, and that caveat should travel with every number taken from it.



What did people actually say about a digital dollar 

❓
On the RBA's summary, around thirty percent indifferent, around forty percent positive in principle but without seeing an immediate need, and among those with strong views, more than twice as many strongly against as strongly for.



❓
On the RBA's figures, yes, in Australia. Fifty percent used cash at least weekly in 2025 against forty-seven percent in 2022, and fifteen percent of payments by number were cash in 2025 against thirteen percent in 2022.



So what is the central bank going to do instead 

❓
Focus on wholesale. The paper states its principal focus on new forms of money is directed toward wholesale initiatives where the potential benefits are larger, following Project Acacia delivered in May 2026. It is also consulting industry on whether stablecoin issuers should have access to central bank reserves.





A central bank asked whether its citizens needed a new kind of money, and the answer that came back was that the old kind is working, including the one made of paper.

The lesson is not about central banks. It is that in any market where the domestic rail is genuinely good, nothing wins on being newer, and the only honest question left is which markets those are and which ones they are not.

That is why the loop we build is aimed at the joins rather than at anybody's domestic rail. Meridian Pay accepts USDC and EURC. YieldVault sweeps idle balances into tokenized Treasuries such as USYC, with yield coming from the underlying Treasuries and no fixed or guaranteed rate offered or implied. Payment Streaming pays by the second. And Firmata verifies the counterparty at every step, composing ERC-8004 for identity and reputation with ERC-8183 for conditional escrow, settled over x402.

Firmata does not perform anti-money-laundering or know-your-customer checks and does not replace anybody's obligations. It publishes and checks verifiable claims about a counterparty, and holds funds against a condition.

All of it runs on Arc testnet today, end to end. Mainnet, with real funds, comes after a security audit and not before,coming soon.
Arc mainnet is 16 September 2026 🥂



Not investment advice. Nothing here is a characterisation of Australian policy beyond what the cited documents say.

🏛️ The Clearest Retail CBDC Decision of the Year Landed This Week. It Did Not Go to Stablecoins Either.

Home

Forum

Events

Content

Courses

Collections

People

Contributors

Albums

Groups

Chat

Channels

Not being used

Help

Join the global network of builders developing the Economic OS for the internet. We’re reimagining how value moves, creating the tools that make the economy work for everyone.

Arc House

What is your job title?

Join a global network of builders developing the Economic OS for the internet. We’re reimagining how value moves, creating the tools that make that economy work for everyone. 

Arc House | Build the economic OS for the internet with us

Copyright

Terms of Service

Privacy

Code of Conduct

Your Privacy Choices

It looks like there is no account associated with the email you provided. The event is for members only. Please complete the application to join our community first.

Thank you for your interest in joining us

Thanks for your interest in joining the event. However, your account is still pending. Once it's approved, you'll be able to register for the event. Please contact us via community@arc.io if you need support.

Pending Approval

Login to the The Arc Community Hub community to connect with others, attend community events, and more!

Login or Sign Up for even more

To unlock all parts of the community complete your profile using verifiable and real information.

Hey, complete your profile

It looks like there is no account associated with the email you provided. Please complete the application to join our community.

Thank you for your interest in joining Arc House.

Thanks for your interest in joining Arc House. We will review your request shortly and email you once it's approved. Meanwhile, please feel free to contact us via community@arc.io for any questions.

Accounts are unapproved when profile information cannot be verified or when activity patterns indicate spam, inorganic participation, or behavior that undermines trust in the program.

To strengthen your profile for future consideration, sign in with a verified LinkedIn account, use real and current profile information, and participate constructively in other community spaces.

Commercial customers should raise concerns through their support channel.

https://www.arc.network/community-guidelines