A report from the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) estimates Australia’s tokenised asset market could reach roughly $17 billion USD (A$24 billion) per year. The report’s core message is that Australia has a sizeable tokenisation prize on the table, but policy inertia could leave it largely unrealised.
DFCRC, working with the Digital Economy Council of Australia and backed with funding from OKX, argues that regulatory delays and fragmented decision-making are constraining institutional adoption. In the report’s base-case warning, Australia captures only about $710 million USD (A$1 billion) of the opportunity by 2030 if the current pace persists.
Where the report says Australia is getting stuck
DFCRC’s paper, titled “Unlocking Australia’s $24b Digital Finance Opportunity,” points to slow, disjointed regulation and unclear licensing routes as the main blockers to scaling tokenised markets. The report argues that without a coherent regulatory runway, institutional participants will hesitate to allocate meaningful capital or build long-term exposure to tokenised products.
The authors attribute the drag to three recurring issues: long regulatory timelines, weak coordination across government bodies, and a missing pathway to move successful pilots into mainstream market infrastructure. In plain terms, the report says Australia is running pilots without a reliable mechanism to industrialise them. That gap, DFCRC warns, reduces the odds of attracting foreign capital and discourages asset managers from treating tokenisation as more than an experiment.
DFCRC also frames the consequences in market-structure terms, warning that uncertainty narrows liquidity and limits the pool of institutional counterparties willing to market-make. The report’s view is that regulatory ambiguity becomes an indirect tax on liquidity, raising the cost of capital and depressing secondary trading depth for domestic tokenisation projects.
What the report recommends to unlock scale
DFCRC calls for a regulatory sandbox and clearer licensing frameworks as the quickest way to turn pilots into scalable rails. The report positions these steps as prerequisites for moving beyond proof-of-concepts into production-grade market infrastructure. It specifically highlights the need to accelerate tokenised government bonds, wholesale CBDC pilots, and tokenised payment and collateral management rails, arguing these would create credible institutional corridors for adoption.
The report places Australia’s trajectory against peers, noting that jurisdictions such as Singapore and the European Union have moved more proactively. By pointing to Singapore’s tokenisation pilots and the EU’s MiCA framework, DFCRC is effectively warning that policy speed is becoming a competitive moat for talent and capital. Industry supporters echoed that urgency, with OKX CEO Kate Cooper calling for decisive action.
