Australian Parliamentary Committee Sets Guidelines to Give Crypto Industry a Big Push

Australia’s parliamentary committee on crypto-assets aims to bring concrete regulatory and policy changes to give a major push to the crypto industry in the country. The committee believes Australia needs a robust policy and regulatory changes to help it compete against the global leaders. The said committee released a draft report on 20th October outlining the need for encouraging investors and ensuring protection against frauds.

Some of the key recommendations in the draft report include,

• Establishing a market licensing regime for Digital Currency Exchanges, including capital adequacy, auditing, and responsible person tests under the Treasury portfolio
• Establishing a custody or depository regime for digital assets with minimum standards under the Treasury portfolio
• Conducting a token mapping exercise to determine the best way to characterize the various types of digital asset tokens in Australia

Andrew Bragg, a senator from the conservative Liberal Party and chair of the committee said that the recommendations in the draft would help Australia set a new regulatory framework for the highly popular crypto industry which will, in turn, help Australia compete against the likes of Singapore and UK. He said,

“The draft recommendations are a big push to detail a cryptocurrency framework for Australia, which would allow us to compete with the U.K. and Singapore,”

Crypto Market Has Become Too Big to Ignore

The Crypto market was primarily seen as a speculative ecosystem for the most past of its life, but that perception has changed quite fast over the past year. Governments have now realized that the crypto market has become too big to ignore as a fad. This is why the likes of El Salvador have made Bitcoin a legal tender, while Paraguay passed a law to legalize the use of Bitcoin and Ethereum in the financial market.

The United States’s policymakers who were adamant about keeping the crypto market at bay have finally approved the first-ever Bitcoin Futures ETF. This shows how the sentiment around the crypto market has changed as it became a $2.5 trillion industry again in October.

About Author

An engineering graduate, Prashant focuses on UK and Indian markets. As a crypto-journalist, his interests lie in blockchain technology adoption across emerging economies.