A central bank and treasury study that summarizes the state-of-the-art CBDC research explains the reasoning. A three-year plan outlining future work on digital money in Australia is also included in the paper.

It finds that Australia has not yet seen the emergence of a convincing argument in the public interest to issue a retail CBDC. The fact that Australians are usually satisfied with the functionality and dependability of the present retail payment system serves as one of the main sources of information for this assessment.

According to the RBA, the primary reasons are less relevant in Australia in jurisdictions that have issued retail CBDCs or made it clear that they are fairly likely to happen in the near future.

However, the RBA and Treasury do not rule out the prospect that this judgment would alter in the future as the costs and benefits become more fully known, both domestically and globally.

The paper also emphasizes how a wholesale CBDC may improve the efficiency of Australia's wholesale markets in conjunction with other digital currencies and infrastructural improvements.

"The RBA is making a strategic commitment to prioritise its work agenda on wholesale digital money and infrastructure - including wholesale CBDC," states Brad Jones, assistant governor (financial system) at the RBA. As of right now, we believe that wholesale CBDCs provide more potential advantages than retail CBDCs, and that their challenges are less severe.

The public phase of "Project Acacia," which will investigate ways to enhance the effectiveness, openness, and resilience of wholesale markets through tokenization and new settlement technology, is scheduled to begin next month by the central bank.

The main goal will be to comprehend the potential advantages that novel ledger configurations and tokenized market ideas like "programmability" and "atomic settlement" might bring about for the Australian financial system and the broader economy.

According to Jones: "This initiative will form part of a larger effort to step up our engagement with industry and other stakeholders on the question of how our monetary arrangements could better support the Australian economy in the digital age."