A privacy trade-off nobody wants

Earlier this year, the Reserve Bank of Australia launched Project Acacia. As per the RBA’s website, this retail central bank digital currency pilot is designed to “explore how innovations in digital money and existing settlement infrastructure might support the development of Australian wholesale tokenized asset markets.”

The pilot project launched with 24 use cases, 19 of which will involve real money and real asset transactions, and five of which will involve simulated transactions as proof-of-concept only. It happened despite the fact that the RBA published a report in 2024 stating that “there is no clear public interest case to issue retail CBDC in Australia as yet.” 

As that same report highlights, “Australians are currently well served by a retail payments system that, by global standards, is efficient, innovative, and safe.” Yet, less than one year after that report was published, this CBDC trial is here. Which begs the question, why? One possible (and concerning) answer is control. 

Rollouts and roadblocks

It’s worth mentioning that the Australian Securities and Investments Commission “is providing regulatory relief to participants to support and streamline the pilot…[supporting] the responsible testing of tokenized asset transactions, in some cases using CDBCs, between participants and a limited number of financial institutions.” In other words, participants in the trial are receiving support that members of the general public and organizations choosing to adopt a CDBC once the trial is over would not. It’s possible that individuals who aren’t tech savvy could end up falling foul of regulations and/or scams unless a CDBC is rolled out in just the right way.

Any flaw or hiccup in that rollout, from downtime to interoperability issues, erodes trust in the technology and institutions involved. If that mistrust intensifies, we may see the chasm between digital-first and cash-centric spenders grow wider. Closer monitoring of and regulation around CDBCs can help mitigate this, but also increases the risk of misuse.

Although few believe that the centralized infrastructure required for a CBDC would be abused on day one, the fact is that the potential to freeze, restrict, or entirely block certain types of spending or spenders exists. Whatever guardrails might be in place, the potential for this sort of abuse is there. For sceptics, it’s not a case of “if” but “when” that will happen.

Programmable money, programmable control

The big concern here is that a CBDC could potentially let the government digitally monitor every transaction made using the platform. That’s a worry for Australian citizens, with two-thirds of those who responded to the RBA’s 2022 Consumer Payments Survey stating that they “often or always consider privacy when deciding how to pay for things.”

Although the RBA’s report acknowledges “the possibility of having a retail CBDC offer full anonymity for at least some transaction types,” regulatory requirements around money laundering, tax evasion, and so on mean that it’s unlikely any CBDC will ever offer the same level of anonymity that cash or crypto do.

World governments are, understandably, eager to downplay this aspect of CBDCs. 

Take the Bank of England, which information hub about the digital pound asserts that “data privacy regulations would still be in force and neither the Bank nor the Government would have access to your personal data” and that “neither the Bank of England nor the Government would be able to program your digital pounds or restrict how you spent them.” They do, however, acknowledge in the same breath that “you would have a commercial relationship with your [wallet] provider and they would require some form of ID to prevent financial crime or fraud.” The UK’s vision for implementing a CDBC sounds a lot like traditional banking infrastructure, which has not historically proven immune to third-party influences.

Final thoughts

The RBA has already acknowledged that “the potential benefits and use cases for a wholesale CBDC [i.e., one used exclusively by central banks, commercial banks, etc. to settle transactions involving tokenized assets] seem more tangible at this point.” So why bother to press ahead with a retail CBDC at all? 

Some in the Australian government would no doubt argue that it would be a coup for Project Acacia to blossom into a full-fledged retail CBDC. Indeed, at the time of writing, only three countries—Jamaica, Nigeria, and the Bahamas—have successfully launched CBDCs. This is still very much uncharted territory, and many believe that the only way out is through. We’ll have to wait and see, based on the pilot program, whether decision makers in Australia find enough reasons to justify a wider rollout.