Parliament passed the Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill on 1 April 2026, and it received Royal Assent on 8 April as Act No. 38 of 2026.12 Australia now has a licensing regime for the businesses that hold crypto assets for other people.
What the Act does
- Two new regulated activities: operating a digital asset platform, where the operator holds digital tokens for customers, and a tokenised custody platform, where the operator holds real-world assets and issues tokens that represent them.3
- An AFS licence: operators of both will need an Australian Financial Services licence from ASIC.3
- Timing: the Act commences 12 months after Royal Assent, with a transition period for operators to apply.23
- Exemptions: smaller operators below a low-value threshold (total transactions of up to $10 million over 12 months and less than $5,000 held per customer) can be exempt.3
Why it matters to the board
A licence is a promise to the regulator that you can hold customer assets safely. For a crypto business, that promise is mostly cryptographic and operational: how private keys are generated, stored, split and recovered, who can sign, and what happens when an insider or a supplier is compromised. The largest losses in this industry have come from key and wallet compromise, not market moves.
ASIC will set out detailed expectations through guidance and standards. Operators who wait for them will have the least time to build controls that can survive a licence assessment.
Three questions for your next board meeting
- Are we a digital asset platform or a tokenised custody platform under the Act, or do we rely on one?
- Could we evidence today how customer assets are segregated and how signing keys are protected?
- Who in our supply chain (custodian, wallet provider, cloud) could move customer assets, and how would we know?
How we help
We design and review custody, multi-signature and key management for institutional and high-net-worth holders, and map the controls to what a licence assessment will ask. See Treasury & Digital-Asset Custody on the Practice, or brief a CISO.
References
- Parliament of Australia, “Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill 2025”, bill status. aph.gov.au
- Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Act 2026, Act No. 38 of 2026, as made 8 April 2026. legislation.gov.au
- Hall & Wilcox, “Digital assets reform passes: 18-month licensing window opens for platform operators”, 10 April 2026. hallandwilcox.com.au