TL;DR:
- Australia passed the Digital Assets Framework Bill 2025, bringing many crypto exchanges and tokenised custody platforms under its financial services licensing regime.
- Covered operators will need an Australian Financial Services Licence from ASIC, as Canberra shifts from regulatory uncertainty toward implementation and oversight.
- The bill still awaits royal assent, takes effect 12 months later, and clarifies that MPC tools alone do not trigger licensing without asset control.
Australia has taken its biggest step yet toward a dedicated crypto rulebook, passing legislation that will push many digital asset platforms into the country’s financial services licensing system. The Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill 2025 has cleared both houses of Parliament and moves next to royal assent. A market that long operated in regulatory gray space is being pulled into a licensing regime, with Canberra framing the overhaul around consumer protection, market integrity, and regulatory certainty for exchanges, custody businesses, investors, and the wider digital asset sector preparing for implementation.
What the new licensing framework changes
The new law amends both the Corporations Act and the ASIC Act, creating a structure that directly regulates digital asset platforms and tokenised custody platforms. Crypto operators covered by the framework, including exchanges and custody providers, will need to secure an Australian Financial Services Licence from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. This is not a narrow compliance tweak, but a structural reset for the industry, because the bill reaches into the core operating model of platforms that serve Australian customers and places them under the same licensing architecture used in traditional financial services supervision.
Timing now matters almost as much as scope. The bill still needs royal assent before it becomes law, but once that final step is completed, the framework is set to take effect 12 months later, followed by an additional transition period for businesses to comply. The industry is getting clarity, but not an immediate hard stop, which gives firms some runway to adjust governance, licensing strategy, and custody arrangements before the full requirements begin to bite. The Digital Economy Council of Australia welcomed the move as a long-awaited shift from uncertainty toward implementation.
One of the more pressing questions involved multi-party computation, or MPC, a wallet security method that splits control across multiple parties so no single participant can move funds alone. The government addressed that issue through an addendum to the explanatory memorandum, clarifying that the law applies to platforms that actually hold crypto for customers, not firms that only provide technology used in shared-control arrangements. That distinction may prove crucial for custody design, because it narrows the licensing trigger to factual control of client assets rather than every supporting tool inside the digital asset stack.
