Earlier this week, I wrote about the potential hub status of Australia and the web3 activity that’s happening the country.
For this week’s Friday blog post, where I bring web3 concepts to life, let’s look to Australia at an interesting pilot that was recently completed by Grollo Carbon Ventures (GCV) and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ Bank).
In this pilot, we’re seeing CBDC, asset-back stablecoins, and tokenized carbon credits (real world assets) all come together.
Here’s what we know from publicly available sources:
- Pilot is part of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (central bank) CBDC pilots
- ANZ Bank was issued CBDC by RBA
- ANZ Bank issued stablecoins (A$DC), based on holding the RBA issued CBDC — these stablecoins were then issued to Grollo Carbon Ventures
- In addition, ANZ Bank purchased Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) in their real world asset form and then tokenized these
- Grollo Carbon Ventures used the stablecoin to purchase the tokenized ACCU from ANZ Bank — settling the transaction instantly
- The stablecoin, tokenized carbon credit, and purchase all took place on a public, permissionless blockchain (can’t confirm which blockchain, but do know it’s EVM compatible)
While it’s just a pilot, this is a pretty cool use case.
Tokenization has the potential to improve transparency and minimisation in the carbon markets, as well as bring efficiency in operations — more on that here. In addition, the usage of both CBDC as the reserve asset for a bank-issued stablecoin is an emerging pattern that we are seeing on this side of the world (look at Hong Kong for example).
This type of innovation is needed for market participants to understand both the benefits in deploying tokenization, but also to understand the risks involved and the operational processes required. It’ll also help the Australian regulators create an ecosystem that fits their risk appetite, but also enables innovation thrive.
I was excited when I came across this use case and expect we will see many more traditional institutions rolling out pilots/applications for the tokenization of real world assets with real-time atomic settlement.
Let’s see if that holds true!
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