Nearly a hundred delegates from the Northern Hemisphere, the Emirati region, Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand, descended into Sydney for Policy Week (organised by Blockchain APAC). Most saw the noise from the Trump administration about the US crypto industry as positive, suggesting the USA is open for business. Trump winning the US election proved crypto adoption has scaled enough to become a US election issue. Trump’s administration has been actively engaging with the crypto industry since. This is one of the most bullish signals for crypto I’ve seen since I became a crypto lawyer in 2017.
This US signal seems to have reached Australia, where both main political parties declared their intent to support crypto innovation in Australia. MPs from the Liberal Party – Simon Kennedy MP and Senator Andrew Bragg – announced their desire to regulate crypto in a way that supports crypto and fintech innovation. Crypto and fintech were seen as growth drivers needed to move Australia up the productivity curve. Simon Kennedy MP was also keen to solve issues faced by crypto and fintech companies accessing banking and insurance services.
And since Policy Week, the Australian Treasury has published its whitepaper, announcing its whole-of-government approach to regulating and integrating digital assets into the Australian economy.
During a session run by Hamilton Locke, attended by most of the leading DCEs in Australia – ASIC, APRA and the Treasury provided insights into how Australia’s regulatory perimeter for crypto could be built, with reforms needed for securities laws, payments regulations and AML laws. Government officials in attendance showed their deep understanding of custody, RWA tokenisation, DeFi, staking, stablecoins, interoperability and the implications of licensing certain crypto businesses (which function as onramps/offramps for consumers).
Returning attention to NZ, it seems Australia and NZ share many issues, such as the costs of living, investment skewed towards the property sector, and our brain drain (among others). There’s a good chance that whatever the outcome of the upcoming Australian elections, Australia is heading towards fully embracing crypto and fintech innovation by adopting a clear and balanced regulatory framework (the devil will be in the details). Disappointingly, it seems NZ’s crypto industry has already fallen behind the ROW – we lack sufficient political consensus on the benefits of growing NZ’s crypto industry and we do not have plans to adopt a crypto regulatory framework. From here, NZ will be playing catch up. But we can catch up, and we won’t need to reinvent the wheel. We can start by picking and choosing the best parts of the crypto regulatory frameworks our friends in the EU, Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi (among others) have adopted, with the USA following soon. The most glaring theme from Policy Week was that crypto investment and innovation seems to have bloomed in those jurisdictions which have crypto regulations in place.
Bryan Ventura (partner, Hamilton Locke NZ and vice-chair, BlockchainNZ)
