Northern Trust Advances Tokenized Finance Innovation in Australia Through Project Acacia
NTRS
Published on 07/15/2025 at 02:35
Northern Trust announced a collaboration with Swift to explore how tokenized assets such as carbon credits can be transacted using a commercial bank account in Australia. The initiative, which aims to demonstrate how digital asset innovation can connect seamlessly with core components of the financial system, is part of Project Acacia, a research project led by the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC). The initiative will be supported by The Northern Trust Carbon Ecosystem??, a fully digital platform for the end-to-end lifecycle management of digital carbon credits which utilizes private ledger digital blockchain technology.
With Northern Trust recording, transferring and settling digital carbon credits as instructed in its role as designated custodian, the project will simulate a delivery-versus-payment (DvP) settlement between a tokenized, digital carbon credit and fiat currency, using Swift's infrastructure to coordinate between the asset and payment layers. The aim is to illustrate how traditional commercial banking infrastructure can support simultaneous settlement of tokenized assets. This marks a key step forward in demonstrating interoperability between tokenized ecosystems and traditional financial infrastructure.
Establishing such connectivity is critical for digital assets to become an integral part of the global capital markets. Northern Trust's involvement in Project Acacia reflects its continued commitment to collaborative innovation in digital finance. The project follows its participation in other forward-looking initiatives, including Project Guardian in Singapore, where Northern Trust is working with institutional partners to pilot a green bond report tokenization solution.
More recently, Northern Trust also joined Project Ensemble in Hong Kong to test cross cross border trading of carbon credits.