ANZ completes CBDC pilot project for trading carbon credits

finextra.com:

The Reserve Bank of Australia in March kicked off 14 pilot projects to investigate potential use cases for a CBDC. For this project, ANZ and GCV sought to test tokenisation of real-world, nature based assets, starting with ACCUs.

To do this, ANZ tokenised existing ACCUs and issued its stablecoin, A$DC, enabling GCV to purchase tokenised ACCUs with settlement occurring in near real-time via ANZ smart contracts. The transaction was conducted on a public, permissionless blockchain using a pilot CBDC to support the issuance of ANZ's dollar-backed stablecoin.

ANZ banking services lead Nigel Dobson says: “ When applied to carbon markets, tokenisation has the potential to improve efficiency and transparency, reduce risk and preserve the unique characteristics of underlying projects to incentivise investment in climate solutions.” In a separate use case, ANZ is also partnering with two universities to trial offline CBDC payments via smart cards that can be loaded with funds and used like physical cash. In another pilot, ANZ will test the efficiency and effectiveness of employers using CBDC for superannuation contributions as a viable alternative to traditional payment methods, while a fourth project will look at the issuance of CBDC in line with KYC processes.