Dr Mark Staples

I am a Senior Principal Researcher in CSIRO, and the Chief Technology Officer of the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) as part of CSIRO's participation in the DFCRC. My research is in software architecture, digital finance, blockchain/DLT, and software engineering. I am a co-author of the book Architecture for Blockchain Applications. I represent Australia in the international standardization committee on blockchain ISO/TC 307, under Standard Australia’s leadership of that committee.

At the DFCRC I am the CTO, the computer science discipline lead, and led the technology streams in two major projects that DFCRC jointly led the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). The first eAUD pilot project in 2022 fielded a platform for the world’s first general-purpose “real” central bank digital currency (CBDC) in an advanced economy. The second 2025 pilot project Acacia has investigated the wholesale tokenised asset economy, and as part of that the RBA minted the world's first CBDC on a public blockchain.

When they were active, I was on the steering committee for Australia’s National Blockchain Roadmap and co-chair its working group on Supply Chains, and the OECD’s Blockchain Expert Policy Advisory Board. In 2019 I was the acting director of the Data Standards Body for the Consumer Data Right (Open Banking) during the version 1.0.0 release of those data standards. Previously I was a research group leader for the Software Systems group in Data61 and previously the Empirical Software Engineering research group in NICTA. In 2014 I spent a year as the Systems Engineering team leader at Saluda Medical, a medical device startup spun out of NICTA. Earlier at NICTA I was the founding leader of the Fraunhofer Project Centre in Transport and Logistics at NICTA, and led the creation of the Future Logistics Living Lab with Fraunhofer and SAP Research.