Kristin Westlake, Principal at The Continuum Partners, covered the Australia FIX Conference 2025, which was held October 22 in Sydney.  

Sandbox to settlement – views on the state of the crypto ecosystem from the FIX Australia conference

Speakers:

Richard Galvin, Executive Chairman and CIO,  DACM

Rachael Lucas, Head of Marketing & Communications, BTC Markets

Sagar Desai, APAC Head for Wholesale Client Business, Coinbase Institutional

Kate Cooper, CEO, OKX Australia

Crypto has outgrown its sandbox and is now at the early stages of widespread implementation at scale. Experimentation over the past 5-6 years has provided answers about how defi can deliver utility and revenue in the tradfi world. Strong tailwinds delivered by an enthusiastic embrace of crypto by the US administration has strengthened a groundswell among institutions moving their defi innovations into mainstream operations.

“The flavour of month is digital asset treasuries (DATs),” said Sagar Desai. “Public companies are building DATs to stack their crypto assets as a long-term play – not just a capital gains exercise. These companies are thinking about what the crypto ecosystem will look like in 5-10 years, with a view to centring themselves within that future landscape.”

Tokenisation of money market funds is another area where tradfi and defi are coming together at pace. Globally, outstanding tokenised Treasury products jumped 80% just this year, to $7.4bn. Kate Cooper said these kinds of deployments were a natural fit for large asset managers and banks. “We announced a project in May with Franklin Templeton to tokenise their money market funds, custodied by their money market bank,” she said. “Here in Australia JellyC been involved in this as well, and this is a perfect example of taking global initiatives and making them locally relevant.”

Bonds are likely to be the next asset class to be tokenised, as institutions look for efficiency and cost gains within their balance sheets. Treasuries, bonds and similar assets are the natural first steps for institutions who are familiar and comfortable with the structure and use cases of these products, but it’s likely that more exotic real-world assets will follow soon.

“Larry Fink said earlier this month that in five years everything will be tokenised,” said Rachael Lucas. “We’ve moved on from educating the market to being asked ‘How can I integrate this into my business model?’ It’s well proven now that defi technology can cut costs in a big way by automating manual processes, and reduce the time to it takes to close the books which is a big efficiency story.”

While it’s possible to tokenise anything, a problem that remains unsolved is distribution, and here defi offers new opportunities, said Richard Galvin. “Institutions need to look at new channels and access points to younger generations,” he said “Crypto is that funnel in to Gen Z and younger Millennials who want faster tech and online-only engagement. Bigger, more experiences institutions will increasingly push their marketing resources here, and those who get the packaging and distribution right will be big winners.”

Demand from individual investors for digital assets outside of crypto is growing, evidenced by strong growing interest from the self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF) sector in Australia. 

“We have hundreds of trustees contacting us every month wanting to invest,” said Kate. “40,000 new SMSFs were set up in Australia in last 12 months, 80% of which didn’t use a financial adviser for their investment strategy. The under-50s are participating heavily and all these new funds are looking for control, agency and access. Trustees are seeing what’s possible through crypto, and the burgeoning opportunities to access tokenised real-world assets that were traditionally available only to institutional investors. This democratic access to investment opportunities is part of the original promise of this technology that’s now starting to be fulfilled.”

Regulation of crypto assets and providers remains a source of friction to growth, both in Australia and around the world. Where regulators start do to move, investor interest immediately swells, said Kate. “Last month Treasury here in Australia opened a consultation on digital assets, custody and payments, and there was an immediate momentum shift in the nature and quality of conversations, especially with wholesale and institutional investors who are more engaged than ever before. So regulation is definitely the key to unlocking the maturation of the market.”

However, as Richard pointed out, there are good examples of new technologies leapfrogging regulation into widespread mainstream use. “There is always a mismatch between tech and regulation, and tech always wins this race,” he said. “Taxi licensing regulations in Australia always stymied public transport innovation – then along came Uber and suddenly those regulations were irrelevant. When you have tech that people really want to use, regulation won’t be able to stand in the way.” 

The FIX Trading Community runs a very active global Digital Assets and Technology Committee, providing a neutral space for participants to come together to solve common problems and support industry growth. Institutions interested in joining the conversation can find out more at fixtrading.org.