Australia gives crypto firms until September 30 to get licensed or face fines

Crypto businesses in Australia have 27 days left before the licence deadline. On October 1 the grace period ends, and any firm offering digital asset financial services without an Australian Financial Services licence breaks the law. The fine scales with revenue. ASIC says it can reach 10% of annual turnover, and civil and criminal liability sits on top of that.

The October 1 cutoff

ASIC has run a sector-wide “no-action” position since October 2025, when it rewrote its guidance and told the market that most widely traded digital assets count as financial products. The regulator promised not to enforce while firms sorted out their licences. That promise expires on September 30.

Firms have three ways to meet it: apply for an AFS licence, apply to vary a licence they already hold, or, if they need an Australian market licence or a clearing and settlement facility licence, notify ASIC in writing and hold a pre-application meeting. All three share the same date.

Australia’s crypto licence deadline in numbers

ASIC has counted more than 45 digital asset licence applications since it updated its guidance in October 2025. About 30 of those had arrived by June 25, the day the regulator pushed the deadline back by three months. That extension also widened the relief to firms working as authorised representatives of a licensee, or under intermediary authorisation arrangements.

Products the relief never covered

Three categories sat outside the no-action position from the start, which leaves the firms offering them exposed for the whole transition:

• crypto lending and “earn” products
• non-cash payment facilities where a digital asset makes the payment, unless that asset is a stablecoin
• derivatives on digital assets, other than wrapped tokens

“Many widely traded digital assets are financial products under current law – and will remain so under the Government’s proposed law reform – meaning many providers require a financial services licence.”

— Alan Kirkland, ASIC Commissioner, ASIC, media release 25-250MR

Quote source: ASIC

For readers holding accounts on Australian platforms

A licence puts the platform under conduct obligations and dispute resolution rules, and it gives ASIC something to act on when customers lose money. Readers may recall our piece on Yepbit, the platform ASIC added to its investor alert list months before customers said withdrawals had stopped. The alert warned people. It could not force the platform to do anything.

Two things worth doing in October: find the AFS licence number on your provider’s site, then look it up in ASIC’s register. If a platform drops a product in the fourth quarter, that says something about how its application is going.

The bigger deadline is 2027

This transition still runs on the old law. The Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Act 2026 passed Parliament on April 1, received Royal Assent on April 8 as Act No. 38, and commences on April 9, 2027. It creates two new licensed categories, digital asset platforms and tokenised custody platforms. Firms that pass through the current gate will face a second one about six months later. Our regulation page for Australia tracks where the country stands.

ASIC has moved this line once. Its notice to the industry now carries the title “Deadline looms”, which reads differently from the guidance it published last October under the word “supports”. October will show how many firms took the change in tone seriously.

None of this should be read as personalized investment advice.