Australia splits digital-asset and tokenisation oversight across four agencies rather than concentrating it in one regulator the way Singapore's MAS or Hong Kong's HKMA/SFC pairing does. ASIC owns conduct and licensing, RBA owns wholesale settlement experimentation, APRA owns prudential treatment for banks and insurers, and AUSTRAC owns the AML/CTF perimeter, with Treasury holding the legislative pipeline that eventually reallocates work between them. For an operator new to the market, the four-way split is the first thing to understand: a tokenisation product typically touches at least two of these agencies before it reaches a customer, and which two depends on the wrapper chosen.
ASIC: conduct, licensing, and the AFSL default
ASIC is the conduct regulator and the agency most operators interact with first. Its signature move has been to classify a meaningful share of crypto-assets and tokenised products as financial products triggering the Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL) regime, primarily through INFO 225 (crypto-asset offers and intermediaries) and INFO 273 (stablecoin and crypto-related advice). The default for any tokenised investment offering, whether the wrapper is a managed investment scheme, a derivative, or a security-style instrument, is to fit it into an AFSL plus the relevant product disclosure regime rather than wait for bespoke law. The Digital Assets Framework Bill (passed 1 April 2026; see the Australia jurisdiction page) extends this AFSL-first posture formally to digital asset platforms and tokenised custody platforms, rather than displacing it.
RBA: wholesale settlement experimentation
RBA runs the wholesale settlement experiments, most visibly Project Acacia, the RBA-DFCRC wholesale CBDC and tokenised-asset pilot whose final report published 19 May 2026. RBA's posture across Acacia's two phases has been settlement-asset-agnostic: rather than committing early to wholesale CBDC, tokenised deposits, or stablecoins as the settlement rail, the pilot tested all three (plus conventional Exchange Settlement Account balances) side by side, deferring the settlement-asset question to the evidence rather than picking a design in advance.
APRA: prudential treatment, conservative by design
APRA is the prudential regulator for banks and insurers, with a conservative posture on tokenised deposits and digital-asset exposures; capital and liquidity treatment tracks Basel guidance closely rather than developing bespoke tokenisation-specific rules. This matters for any bank-led tokenised-deposit programme (CBA, Westpac, NAB, ANZ, and Macquarie all run internal or consortium pilots): the balance-sheet treatment of a tokenised deposit is governed by the same prudential lens as a conventional deposit, with no separate lighter-touch regime for the tokenised form.
AUSTRAC: the AML/CTF perimeter
AUSTRAC runs the AML/CTF perimeter through Digital Currency Exchange (DCE) registration, capturing most exchanges and remitters operating in or from Australia. The DCE registration regime predates the Digital Assets Framework Bill and continues to operate alongside it; a digital asset platform licensed under the new AFSL-based regime still needs DCE registration if it functions as an exchange.
Treasury: the legislative pipeline
Treasury owns the legislative pipeline, running from the 2023 Token Mapping consultation paper through the Regulating Digital Asset Platforms proposal to the Digital Assets Framework Bill's passage on 1 April 2026. The fit-existing-law approach that ASIC, APRA, and AUSTRAC each apply has clear limits for genuinely novel custody and intermediary categories, which is why the legislative pipeline mattered even while it moved slowly through consultation: digital asset platforms and tokenised custody platforms are the categories that the fit-existing-law approach could not stretch to cover without a new statutory basis.
Related
- Australia for the current standing state and recent developments.
- Project Acacia for the wholesale settlement pilot RBA runs inside this architecture.
- hong kong, singapore for how a two-regulator (HKMA/SFC) or single-regulator (MAS) split compares operationally.