The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) will explore the development of wholesale tokenized asset markets alongside an array of industry participants.

«Project Acacia» will use stablecoins, pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) and bank deposit tokens in 24 use cases of tokenizing a range of asset classes, such as fixed income and private markets.

Tokenization refers to the process of minting assets such as bonds and equities as tokens that can be bought, sold and traded on blockchains, with the aim of making processes faster, cheaper and more transparent.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is also providing regulatory relief in order to streamline the pilot, which will involve the testing of tokenized asset transaction between participants and other selected financial institutions, the RBA announced on Thursday.

Issuance of pilot wholesale CBDC for testing the use cases will take place on different blockchain platforms, such as Hedera and R3 Corda.

Participants in Project Acacia include Fireblocks, Northern Trust and Australian banks Commonwealth Bank, Australia and New Zealand Banking Corporation (ANZ) and Westpac.

The project is the a sign of the Australian government’s plans to integrate digital assets into its economy being put into practise.

The Australian Treasury published a whitepaper in March, describing how the government planned to embrace tokenization, real-world assets and wholesale CBDCs to make financial markets more efficient.

This is a daily technical analysis by CoinDesk analyst and Chartered Market Technician Omkar Godbole.

Bitcoin’s BTC spot price has surpassed $111,000 and could rise by another 30% to exceed $140,000.

That’s the message from the daily price chart of BlackRock’s Nasdaq-listed spot bitcoin ETF, known by its IBIT ticker, which shows a bull flag breakout.

The ETF, mandated to closely track the BTC spot price, rose 2.85% on Wednesday, briefly surpassing the May high of $63.70, according to data source TradingView.

The advance reconfirmed the flag breakout seen early this month, a sign that the five-and-a-half-week counter-trend consolidation has ended and the broader uptrend from April lows has resumed.

Flags are bullish continuation patterns, and breakouts typically see analysts anticipate a price rally equal to the magnitude of the initial run higher. The so-called measured move method implies at least 30% upside for both IBIT and bitcoin’s spot price.

Flags have a low failure rate, according to technical analysis theory. That said, the pattern could fail if macro factors take a turn for the worse, pushing prices back into a counter-trend consolidation. Such a move would negate the bullish outlook.

As of now, bitcoin’s spot price also indicates a bullish setup, suggesting a potential rally to $134,000, according to veteran chart analyst Peter Brandt.

Ethereum’s native token, ether ETH, rose nearly 6% Wednesday, outperforming bitcoin (BTC), XRP (XRP) and solana’s SOL (SOL) as expected. The outperformance saw record trading activity in BlackRock’s spot ether exchange-traded fund (ETF), ETHA, listed on Nasdaq.

More than 43 million shares of ETHA changed hands Wednesday, the highest single-day tally since the fund’s debut a year ago, nearly doubling from the previous day’s total of 24 million, according to data source Yahoo Finance.

Daily volumes have been rising for over a month, as evidenced by the 30-day average, which has climbed to a record 18.83 million from 12.97 million in early June, according to data source TradingView.

The ETF has also seen brisk inflow of investor money, pointing to a bullish market sentiment for the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value. The ETF has collected over $1.20 billion in investor money since June, with the net inflows totaling $159 million on Tuesday, the biggest single-day tally since June 11, according to data source SoSoValue.