Australia faces an institutional infrastructure choice: build it here, or import it later

Lucas Dobbins

Australia risks becoming a user of offshore digital finance infrastructure rather than a builder of its own unless local operators move quickly to develop regulated, institutional-grade market systems, BTC Markets CEO Lucas Dobbins has cautioned.

Speaking at the recent DECA Conference in Sydney, which brought together digital asset industry leaders, policymakers, regulators, investors, infrastructure providers and technology builders, Dobbins said Australia now has the regulatory signals and technical blueprint needed to modernise its financial market infrastructure.

The question, he said, is whether that infrastructure is built under Australian law, supervised by Australian regulators and operated by Australian market participants – or imported later from offshore.

“Australia has modelled what next-generation market infrastructure could look like,” Dobbins said. “Regulators have made clear that innovation sits within their remit. The question now is who builds it, where it is built, and under whose rules it operates.”

Project Acacia moves the debate from theory to execution

BTC Markets said the Reserve Bank of Australia and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre’s Project Acacia has materially shifted the debate on digital finance infrastructure.

The project tested wholesale digital asset use cases, including tokenised assets, stablecoins and a pilot central bank digital currency, showing how these systems could operate together in a regulated environment.

Dobbins said Project Acacia reinforced that the challenge for Australia is no longer whether the technology works, but whether the market can coordinate quickly enough to build institutional-grade infrastructure locally.

“Project Acacia has shown that tokenised assets, digital money and regulated market infrastructure can work together,” he said. “That moves the conversation from proof of concept to implementation.”

“This is not a technology question anymore. It is an execution question.”

Sovereign capability is now a financial infrastructure issue 

BTC Markets said sovereign digital finance infrastructure is critical to Australia’s long-term competitiveness, market resilience and regulatory oversight.

Without locally built infrastructure, Australia risks relying on offshore platforms for the next generation of market activity, raising questions about oversight, resilience, investor protection and the long-term development of Australia’s financial services sector.

Building this capability domestically would help Australia:

• maintain regulatory oversight of critical market systems
• support local market participants and institutional adoption
• attract global capital into Australian-regulated platforms
• and strengthen financial system resilience and competitiveness.

The company said recent global developments show why jurisdictional control over critical infrastructure matters. Access to advanced technologies, payments systems and financial networks is increasingly shaped by national policy settings, geopolitical priorities and regulatory permissions.

Operators needed to move from blueprint to reality

Dobbins said Australia already has many of the foundations in place, including a sophisticated financial sector, strong regulators and a clear opportunity to build digital asset infrastructure within the regulatory perimeter.

“Other markets are moving from pilots to implementation,” he said. “Capital, talent and liquidity will follow the jurisdictions where trusted infrastructure is live.”

BTC Markets has operated digital asset infrastructure in Australia for more than a decade and has notified ASIC of its intention to apply for an Australian Market Licence.

Dobbins said the next phase of Australia’s digital asset market will not be defined by speculation, but by regulated infrastructure, institutional participation and market-grade accountability.

“This is not about any single institution,” he said. “It is about whether Australia builds the rails for the next phase of financial markets here or waits to connect to someone else’s system later.”