Money is critical infrastructure & most people only notice it when it fails. This session explains how trust in digital payments & settlements can be strengthened as cyber threats rise, economies digitize, and quantum moves from theory to threat. You’ll leave with practical trust upgrades that matter most for the decade ahead - access to resilient, secure money & payments in the age of disruption.

Wholesale digital money is moving from experimentation to infrastructure. Across the Indo-Pacific & Europe, central banks, regulators & financial institutions are testing tokenised settlement models to improve cross-border payments, liquidity efficiency & risk management through initiatives such as Project Acacia (Australia), Project Guardian and BLOOM (Singapore).

This closed-door session convenes senior leaders from policy, banking, market infrastructure, and technology providers to compare takeaways from leading pilots and align on what it will take to move from proofs-of-concept to interoperable, secure, scalable wholesale settlement rails across jurisdictions.  

The roundtable builds on GFTN’s recently launched Digital Money principles, emphasising interoperability, sovereignty, resilience, trust, and inclusion. Participants will also consider enabling foundations underpinning trusted digital markets. 

As economies digitalise, over-centralised platforms create systemic cyber, operational, and climate risks - while many blockchain experiments remain speculative and poorly governed. This session brings together global research and regional industry perspectives to examine how blockchain can overcome these challenges and serve as the best foundation for organising decentralised mainstream societies.

In the first part, Bill Roscoe, Director of the University College Oxford Blockchain Research Centre, draws on his new book Understanding Decentralised Systems and the work of his Digital Civilisation project. He addresses the inefficiencies and governance challenges that have kept blockchain from mainstream adoption, and makes the case that the very qualities which make it ideal for cryptocurrency also make it the best way to organise decentralised mainstream societies.

The second part, presented by members of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) Blockchain Committee, offers a timely snapshot of where blockchain stands today in Australia. The panel explores adoption across finance, supply chains, digital identity, and the creative economy, alongside regulatory developments, ecosystem challenges, and opportunities for innovation and growth.

Together, both parts provide attendees with a practical and forward-looking view of what is needed to strengthen capability, collaboration, and global competitiveness in this rapidly evolving technology sector.