The market has moved. Now it’s time for the infrastructure to catch up.

I've spent the better part of a decade watching Australia's digital asset industry grow up.

When I joined BTC Markets, crypto was still treated like a fringe experiment, interesting to some, alarming to others, and largely ignored by the institutions that move capital. One in eight Australians now holds digital assets. The industry I stepped into is not the one that exists today.

What's changed isn't just the numbers. It's the nature of the conversation.

This week at SIAA, we'll be joining Dan Jowett and Jonny Wilkinson on the panel exploring digital assets, stablecoins and tokenisation. We won't be arguing whether digital assets belong in the financial system. That question has been answered. What we'll be exploring is the harder one: how do we build the infrastructure, the policy settings, and the market structures that let this asset class fulfil its actual potential?

From speculation to structure

The shift happening right now in Australian digital asset markets is structural, not cyclical.

For years, the headline story was price, bull runs, bear markets, the relentless drama of volatility. That chapter isn't entirely closed, but it's no longer the whole story. What's emerging alongside it is something more durable: a move toward regulated investment products, tokenised real-world assets, stablecoins, and the early architecture of a digital capital market.

It's a story about a new layer of financial infrastructure being built, one that changes who can access markets, how capital moves, and what it costs to participate.

The policy moment we've been waiting for

Regulatory clarity has been a long time coming in Australia. I've spent years in conversations, with policymakers, with institutions, with fellow industry participants, making the case that digital assets aren't a threat to be managed but an opportunity to be shaped.

The progress we're seeing now, on licensing frameworks, on stablecoin policy, on the treatment of tokenised deposits, is the result of sustained, good-faith engagement between industry and government. It hasn't been glamorous work. But it's the work that matters.

What Australia is building, incrementally, carefully, and with genuine consultation, is a framework that can support institutional participation without sacrificing investor protection. That balance is hard to get right. Countries that moved too fast created instability. Countries that moved too slowly are now playing catch-up. Australia could be neither.

For intermediaries, brokers, issuers, custodians, operating within licensed and supervised markets, this moment is genuinely exciting. The challenges are real: compliance costs, operational complexity, the need to build trust with clients navigating unfamiliar terrain. But the opportunity is equally real. Regulated digital asset markets create durable competitive advantages for the participants who get in early and get it right.

What tokenisation changes

I want to be direct about something. Tokenisation is often presented as a technical upgrade, faster settlement, fractional ownership, programmable assets. These are real benefits. But they undersell what's happening.

Tokenisation expands the investable universe. Assets that were previously illiquid, inaccessible, or available only to wholesale investors can be structured, distributed, and traded at a fraction of the traditional cost. That changes who can participate in markets. It changes how capital flows. It changes the commercial logic of being a broker, an issuer, or a custodian.

But for tokenised markets to function, you need more than the technology. You need the access pathways. The custody frameworks. The regulatory clarity. The institutional infrastructure to support it.

These aren't separate conversations. They're the same conversation, and it's the one the Australian industry needs to be having more loudly, and more precisely, right now.

A note on where we are

I stepped back from the CEO role at BTC Markets last year. It was the right time, and I'm proud of what the team continues to build. From my position on the board, I can see the business, and the industry, with some useful distance.

What I see is genuine maturity, an industry that has done the hard yards. It has built through bear markets. Engaged with regulators, invested in compliance and operational discipline. It will reshape Australia capital markets over the next decade. It’s the market to meet the moment

BTC Markets was built on the belief that Australians deserve a crypto and digital asset platform designed for them, with compliance, transparency and security at its core. That belief hasn't changed. What has changed is the environment around it. The infrastructure being built today, by exchanges, by custodians, by brokers, by the regulators working to get the frameworks right, is the foundation for something that could meaningfully reshape Australian capital markets over the next decade.

That's not a small thing.

If you're at SIAA this week, come find me. The conversation is just getting started.

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