While digital payments have transformed e-commerce, they are not without drawbacks. The most noticeable issues arise from extended payment settlement times and the costs incurred from card fees, largely due to reliance on credit card payment networks. To address these shortfalls, real-time payments have been introduced by various central banks. Although real-time payment systems have been available for some time and present numerous advantages, their adoption in Australia is still limited. This paper provides an in-depth overview of Australia’s real-time payment network architecture, the New Payment Platform (NPP), including details of its service products and presents several use cases. While the aim is to inspire further innovations in the payment system utilising the NPP platform, the paper also examines the reasons for the limited adoption of real-time payments despite their clear advantages over traditional digital payment methods.

Blockchain systems rely on miners to produce blocks, who solely build blocks for their financial benefit. Within the competitive market system, only correct blocks get accepted, which ensures security of the network. As financial applications migrate into the blockchain, miners in this privileged position have identified ways to extract additional revenues (known as MEV) that affect users and  the overall security of the system. A possible direction for current research to resolve this exploitation is to separate the sequencing (building) and execution (mining/proposing) of transactions (PBS model). However, a weaker point of this model is the trust assumption between participants and the incentive model. This paper proposes a concept of separate incentive schemes for the work various participants conduct in their own interests.