Project Acacia · Reserve Bank of Australia

Legally orthodox. Operationally certain.

The deal, expressed as state.

Under the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Project Acacia pilot, NotCentralised set out to answer one question: what makes a lending market efficient? The answer became a thesis — and the thesis became a product. YieldFabric is what Project Acacia built.

From the report “Collateralised Lending Markets: A Tokenised Micro-Structure Approach,” by Arturo Rodriguez, NotCentralised.

The core insight is economic
(Data + Operational)×Integrity=Market Efficiency

When loan state, collateral position, trigger compliance, and entitlement are deterministically verifiable — and call rights can be programmatically enforced — the unit economics of structured execution improve materially. Protections that were viable only at large scale become accessible at smaller transaction sizes.

Tokenisation here is not a cosmetic wrapper. It is the expression of financial exposure as deterministic state — preserving existing legal, fiduciary, and regulatory frameworks while removing the operational friction around them.

The problem

Robust economics. Fragmented operations.

Private credit markets are economically robust but operationally fragmented. They rely on layered coordination between originators, trustees, banks, administrators, and investors — and the friction comes not from flawed economic design, but from fragmented systems and process-dependent verification.

Residual uncertainty
Diligence and capital buffers compensate for gaps in data and documentation.
High minimum size
Reconciliation and intermediation make small exposures uneconomic.
Concentrated safety
Structured protections stay locked inside large pooled vehicles.
The shift

From representing performance to referencing state.

The distinction is infrastructural. Asset existence, balance evolution, and trigger compliance become mechanically attestable rather than procedurally inferred — and when reference state is reliable, the operational cost of trust declines.

Report-based

Participants rely on representations of performance — reconciled across systems, inferred from documents, lagged by reporting cycles. Uncertainty lives in the operational execution.

State-based

Participants reference the state directly. Historical transitions form an immutable audit trail; entitlement is referenced without reconstructing documentation. Uncertainty shifts to credit performance — where it belongs.

The building blocks

Financial exposure as deterministic state.

Once loans and obligations are state objects, structured funding can be assembled from a small set of non-custodial primitives — each preserving legal rights and trustee authority while compressing the operations around them.

Tokenised loans & obligations

A loan becomes a stateful instrument whose balance, accrual, and status evolve through cryptographically-committed, time-ordered transitions. Entitlement, balance, and transfer mechanics are unified — so a payment right can move, be pledged, or be financed without reconstructing documentation.

Programmed callability

In traditional finance, a call right needs notice, discretion, and enforcement. Here it is embedded in the asset itself: the holder exercises withdrawal, redemption, or collateral enforcement cryptographically. It does not replace the legal right — it operationalises it.

Non-custodial swap & escrow

A conditional exchange settled by a smart contract that enforces simultaneous delivery: both legs settle or assets revert. The contract takes no economic ownership and exercises no discretion — it removes settlement-gap risk and the cost of bilateral structuring.

Non-custodial repo

Lock a tokenised asset as collateral; the lender delivers the upfront payment. At maturity the outcome is rule-based — repay and the collateral releases, or it transfers to the lender. No discretionary enforcement, no intermediary holding economic control. Smaller-ticket repo becomes viable.

Collateral mobility → asset utility

An asset with mobility can be sold. An asset with collateral mobility can be funded.

Utility is not merely transferability — it is the range of economically viable actions against an exposure: retain and earn carry, sell outright, repo for liquidity, or swap into a different risk position.

RetainSellRepoSwap
One asset layer · many market structures
OTC
Bilateral, negotiated — lighter once state is verifiable.
Orderbooks
Competitive price discovery on standardised exposures.
Dutch auctions
Discrete issuance with competitive spread formation.
Programmed pools
On-demand liquidity, priced at a premium.
Two applied exercises

The thesis, run on live structures.

The report is not a whitepaper. Its claims were demonstrated through two exercises on real Australian credit structures — one modelled, one settled in central-bank money.

Exercise 01Digital Twin

A live ABS, as a state machine.

The Wisr Freedom Trust 2025-1 — a ~A$249.5m Australian consumer-loan securitisation — modelled as deterministic state without altering its bankruptcy-remote legal perimeter. Loan state tracking, waterfall allocation, entitlement verification, and trigger enforcement, expressed as rule-bound transitions.

An ABS already functions as a distributed state machine — coordinated across servicers, banks, trustees, administrators, and calculation agents.

The greatest value sits at the foundational layer: tokenising the loan register and its payment state, fed on-chain via oracles into existing servicing systems.

The ABS becomes a template, not a single vehicle — its safety properties generalise across the lending market.

Capital structure
~A$249.5m · senior → junior
Class A
Aaa(sf)
1.15%
Class B
Aa2(sf)
1.35%
Class C
A2(sf)
1.60%
Class D
Baa2(sf)
1.80%
Class E
Ba2(sf)
3.50%
Class F
B2(sf)
4.50%
Class G1 / G2
Residual
Bar width ∝ tranche sizeMargin over BBSW
Exercise 02CBDC repo pilot

Settled in central-bank money. Executed by YieldFabric.

A collateralised-lending transaction executed entirely on-chain — investor funding, credit deployment, collateral binding, repayment, and redemption, each an atomic swap. Settlement used a wholesale CBDC, an ERC-20 token issued by the Reserve Bank of Australia on the Redbelly Network: the first legal tender issued by a central bank on a public network.

Why CBDC? A direct central-bank liability removes the intermediary exposure of commercial bank money — giving large non-bank institutions clarity of settlement-asset risk and finality.

Issuer / Trustee
IQEQ Trustees
Collateral / Trustee
Perpetual Trustees
Investor
Beachhead Venture Capital
Borrower
Redbelly Network
CBDC distributor
Australian Bond Exchange
The lifecycle · six atomic steps
01
Investor funding

The investor swaps 10,000 tokenised AUD for one Investment Token. The token cryptographically grants the right to withdraw from the Issuer Account at any time — no approval, no off-chain coordination.

02
Collateral binding

The issuer swaps a Credit Facility Token for a Collateral Token. The credit line is established entirely through token-based permissions rather than legal mandates.

03
Origination

The collateral account deploys 5,000 tokenised AUD to the borrower via atomic swap, receiving a Loan Token (the repayment obligation) and the pledged digital collateral.

04
Investor capital call

The investor unilaterally withdraws 5,000 tokenised AUD using the Investment Token — without issuer consent, and without disturbing the originated loan.

05
Repurchase

The borrower repays 5,000 tokenised AUD and reclaims the Loan Token and collateral. Liquidity returns to the issuer. The loan is extinguished.

06
Final redemption

The investor withdraws the remaining capital. The Issuer Account settles to zero — every obligation satisfied, no residual discretionary claim remaining.

Every right, a token
ERC-721
Investment Token
Economic interest + enforced authority to withdraw from the issuer.
ERC-721
Credit Facility Token
An on-chain credit line — authority to draw from the issuer.
ERC-721
Collateral Token
Control over the collateralised assets.
ERC-721
Loan Token
The borrower’s repayment obligation and its programmed cashflows.
ERC-20
Payment Token
Fully backed by CBDC — one unit of CBDC held in escrow per token.
Rehypothecation, made explicit

A chain of risk you can trace.

In a YieldFabric repo swap, the lender receives a single stateful instrument — a composed contract bundling the pledged collateral (in escrow) and the right to the repurchase payment. Because that contingent right is itself a clearly-defined token, it can be re-pledged — and the original obligor stays the root anchor of credit risk the whole way down.

Step 1
Obligor pledges
Commits to a defined fork: repurchase by expiry, or forfeit the collateral.
Step 2
Lender holds Contract A
Collateral in escrow + repurchase right — outcome deterministically defined.
Step 3
Re-pledged
The contingent instrument becomes the collateral for the next repo.
Step 4
Next lender holds Contract B
A further contingent layer, still tracing back to the same obligor.

True collateral mobility — multiple funding layers, no physical re-transfer.

Transparent risk propagation — trace any layer back to the originating obligor.

Controlled encumbrance — what is locked and re-pledged is explicit.

Capital efficiency, without severing the linkage to the source of risk.

Private, programmable, auditable

Confidential execution framework.

Institutional counterparties need confidentiality between each other and a single cryptographic source of truth. YieldFabric reconciles the two — balances and counterparties stay private, while correctness stays provable.

Confidential vault

Programmable custody that behaves like a trustee or custodian account — but enforced by on-chain logic. Role separation keeps custody, control, and economic exposure with distinct parties; balances stay private; compliance is provable.

Confidential atomic swap

Delivery-versus-payment between two parties, settled in a single transaction — every leg executes or none does. Composed into bundles, these swaps settle multi-party structures atomically, preserving the separation of custody and control that structured finance requires.

Zero-knowledge proofs

Prove the rules are satisfied — sufficient balance, valid ownership, valid transition — without revealing balances, counterparties, or intent. Proof verification gatekeeps execution; authorised auditors get artefacts without full disclosure.

What it means

Orthodox by law. Certain by design.

Market efficiency emerges when data integrity and operational integrity reduce uncertainty, coordination cost, and evidentiary friction. Expressed as deterministic state — and settled in central-bank money — securitisation-grade protections (defined seniority, rule-bound allocation, limited recourse, collateral mobility) become economically viable at smaller scales.

Funding diversity
Bilateral repo and loan-level funding gain the safety of structured finance.
Capital mobility
Spreads anchor to asset risk, not process or intermediary risk.
Broader participation
Coordination barriers fall; institutional trust rises.
From thesis to product

Project Acacia was the proof. YieldFabric is the product.

The confidential vaults, atomic swaps, zero-knowledge proofs, programmable obligations, and repo-swap framework that ran the pilot are not a prototype — they are YieldFabric. NotCentralised productised the work so any operator can express deals as deterministic state, settle them atomically, and keep them confidential.

Concepts summarised from “Collateralised Lending Markets: A Tokenised Micro-Structure Approach” (Arturo Rodriguez, NotCentralised), prepared in connection with the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Project Acacia pilot. References to the Reserve Bank of Australia are descriptive; no endorsement is implied.