Although Australia has a population of just 26 million people, OKX bets that if policymakers act quickly enough, Australia could become one of the most important digital financial markets in the developed world.
A new report backed by the exchange estimates that Australia could reap an annual economic benefit of A$24 billion ($17 billion) from tokenized markets, payments and assets if lawmakers modernize licensing and market infrastructure rules.
A study by the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Center claims that digital financial innovations could deliver benefits worth around 1% of GDP, primarily through more efficient foreign exchange, capital markets and cross-border payments.
But on the current regulatory trajectory, Australia is expected to capture only A$1 billion of that potential by 2030, missing out on the bulk of the so-called digital finance dividend. The difference between A$24 billion and A$1 billion is at the heart of the industry’s pitch to the government.
“This is particularly important in Australia where productivity is a top priority that the government is trying to track,” Kate Cooper, CEO of OKX Australia, told CoinDesk in an interview, noting that the country’s productivity growth has been roughly flat for the past decade.
Mr Cooper said the idea for the report came from policymakers’ repeated requests for data quantifying the impact of cryptocurrencies on the Australian economy.
It may seem counterintuitive for OKX to focus on Australia when many exchanges are prioritizing the US – rival exchange Gemini recently pulled out, as well as the UK and the European Union – but Cooper argues that the country has a different kind of advantage.
“We have a broad strategy focused on so-called strategic markets, markets where we have a competitive advantage by entering the land-based market,” Cooper said.
This strategy depends on using regulation as an outer moat. In a market like Australia with strict licensing standards and high compliance costs, operating onshore can create a defensible position that cannot be easily replicated by offshore-only platforms.
For OKX, that means investing in local approvals and infrastructure to position itself for institutional flows, especially tokenized bonds, stablecoins and digital market infrastructure scale.
Cooper explained that in a country with one of the world’s largest pools of pension funds, regulated local integration is less about retail trading volume and more about long-term access to concentrated capital.
If MPs enact the right legislation, that capital could help propel Australia into an accelerated phase of digital finance adoption.
Otherwise, Australia risks remaining in what Mr Cooper describes as a “proof-of-concept death spiral”, capturing only a fraction of the A$24 billion opportunity modeled for while the industry and its capital flow overseas.
