Beyond Stablecoins: What Will Power the Next Generation of Money?

Digital money has moved, in the space of a few years, from a specialist technology discussion into a question being asked inside payments, banking and treasury teams across the industry. 

Stablecoins are largely responsible. They are visible, they are in live use in some markets, and they have given fintechs, PSPs and platforms a concrete reason to consider what programmable money might mean for their own operations.  

The attention is deserved, but it has produced a shorthand association — that digital money is principally stablecoin. In practice, stablecoins are one instrument among several: deposit tokens, tokenised deposits, wholesale central bank digital currency and tokenised assets — all moving forward on different timelines. The question that matters is not which form of digital money will prevail. The more useful question is what a settlement asset needs to do that today’s infrastructure cannot. 

In Australia, that question is unusually demanding. Money here already moves between accounts in seconds, at any hour, settled individually in central bank money through the NPP. Any new form of money has to justify itself against infrastructure that is already fast, final and continuously available. The gaps that remain are narrower than the enthusiasm suggests, which is precisely what makes them worth examining. 

Different forms, different jobs 

The forms of digital money now emerging differ in ways that carry real commercial weight: who issues them, what the holder’s claim actually is, how redemption works, and which protections travel. A stablecoin is a claim on a private issuer and the reserves behind it. A deposit token remains a bank deposit, held within the regulatory framework that already governs deposits, but made programmable and capable of moving in real time. Central bank money sits beneath both, as the risk-free asset the rest of the system ultimately converts into. 

The practical conclusion is that different forms of money are likely to serve different purposes, and that understanding the differences matters considerably more than backing a winner.  

None of this interest is ideological. It is coming from the places in payments, settlement and treasury where money, data and obligations travel separately today, producing delay, cost, trapped liquidity and reconciliation effort. The early use cases are forming around those frictions: settlement of tokenised assets, platform and marketplace payouts, treasury and liquidity management, conditional release of funds, and the connections between bank accounts and tokenised environments. In each case the appeal is the same. The conditions, controls and evidence move with the payment, rather than being reconciled around it afterwards. 

The harder problems sit further back. For tokenised money to scale, different forms of it will need to convert into one another, across platforms and payment systems, or the market fragments and liquidity becomes trapped in disconnected pools. A dollar has to remain a dollar regardless of who issued it or where it is recorded. That is a problem of infrastructure, standards and governance before it is one of technology. And moving from pilot to production raises questions the demonstrations were never required to answer — about settlement finality, identity, screening, exception handling, and who is accountable when something goes wrong.

The window is open 

The structures that will shape what follows — a national tokenisation advisory group (a working group charged with taking deposit tokens from legal analysis towards working infrastructure), and licensing reform that will determine how stablecoins are regulated in this country — are being assembled as this article is published. Cuscal, which distributed the pilot wholesale central bank digital currency in Project Acacia and issued a settlement stablecoin backed by central bank money in one of its pilots, is among those at the table. 

What gets decided in this window will carry unusual weight. It is a rare moment in payments: the technology has largely outrun the rules, and the rules are being written now. The same decisions will determine whether Australia builds an open, interoperable system of digital money — or a fragmented one, with liquidity stranded across networks that cannot speak to each other. 

Which leaves the questions the panel exists to work through. How does tokenised money start to scale — and scale safely? What infrastructure, access, relationships and environment can establish and hold the next era of payments? And what should fintechs, PSPs and platforms be doing about it now, rather than later? 

‘Beyond Stablecoins: What Will Power the Next Generation of Money?’ brings together Nathan Churchward, Head of Product Solutions & Innovation at Cuscal, Rob Allen, Executive Director at Icon Future Technologies, and Hannah Glass, Special Counsel at Ashurst Perkins Coie, with Cuscal’s Chief Client Officer, Freya Smith, moderating. 

Thursday 3 September, 1:00pm @ Intersekt ‘26