Case Study: Australian Payments Plus enables fast tokenized settlement with LF Decentralized Trust's Hiero-powered token interchange

Australian Payments Plus settles $5 million in minutes with LF Decentralized Trust

Australian Payments Plus (AP+), an operator of Australia's national payments infrastructure, faced the challenge of bridging two emerging forms of digital money that were not built to work together: widely accessible stablecoins on public networks and a secure, private wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) required by regulators. Their goal, as part of the Reserve Bank of Australia's Project Acacia, was to find a way for these tokens to interoperate to enable atomic settlement for real financial transactions. They partnered with LF Decentralized Trust and used its Hiero open source codebase as the foundation for their solution.

LF Decentralized Trust provided the shared, neutral technology stack that made the hybrid architecture possible. AP+ built a token interchange using Hiero to connect a public Hedera network for stablecoins and a private HashSphere network for the CBDC, using a proxy token mechanism to keep the central bank currency secure. This solution successfully settled approximately $5 million in real-money transactions, reducing settlement times from days to minutes. The project's success helped shift the national conversation from whether tokenization has a future to how it will be implemented, contributing to a broader consideration of new financial market infrastructure for Australia.

Australian Payments Plus