Author: The Australian

Commonwealth Bank’s big crypto play, unveiled last November by chief executive Matt Comyn, is quietly progressing to a second pilot, incorporating changes from CBA’s continuing dialogue with five (yes, five!) regulators. In case you were wondering, the list features the Australian Securities & Investments Commission, the financial intelligence agency Austrac, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, the tax office and the Reserve Bank. The reason for the full-court regulatory press can be summed up in a single word: risk. ASIC’s interest is easily explained – the $2.8 trillion global crypto market has growing breadth and depth, the pace of innovation is…

An Australian sports betting company breaking into the enormous US market has become embroiled in legal action with a key American executive, accusing her of scuppering a $600m sale to a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency firm founded by the world’s richest 29-year-old. Privately held PlayUp, which has sports betting licences in New Jersey and Colorado and fantasy sports operations in Australia and New Zealand, was on the verge of a $US450m ($624m) sale to Sam Backman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange late last year. The deal would have put PlayUp’s Sydney-based chief executive Daniel Simic – who in 2017 resurrected the company brand after…

The nation’s financial watchdog is warning Australians to beware of a push for people to ditch their existing superannuation for a self-managed fund to invest in high-risk cryptocurrency assets. There has been an increase in marketing recommending people switch from industry and retail super funds to SMSFs, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission says. “SMSF trustees are being targeted to invest in crypto-assets, or cryptocurrencies … superannuation is an attractive target for scammers,” ASIC said. Australians hold more than $3.4 trillion in superannuation, including more than $860bn in SMSFs. “Do not rely on social media ads or online contact from…

A study of Bitcoin trading has found that Chinese traders used the cryptocurrency to export $4.6bn of wealth out of the country, circumventing the country’s strict capital outflow restrictions. The restrictions, covering amounts above $US50,000 a year, are intended to control the value of the yuan. A research report by Australian and Chinese academics says almost 8.78 million bitcoins were traded by Chinese nationals between September 2011 and February 2018 in a bid to circumvent capital controls. The report, Evading Capital Controls via Cryptocurrencies: Evidence from the Blockchain, says the US is the most popular country for Chinese capital flight…

One of Australia’s most colourful business identities, online retailer Ruslan Kogan, has found himself an unexpected investor in a major Canadian cryptocurrency outfit. Kogan.com, the publicly-listed online retailer in which Mr Kogan is the largest investor, became a shareholder in the owner of Canadian trading platform Bitbuy in December after agreeing to sell it the rights to Bitbuy.com. Kogan.com had owned the domain since 2013, one of an enormous number the company had acquired. As part of the deal Kogan.com and Bitbuy agreed to enter into an advertising arrangement, with Kogan to support the crypto exchange’s planned entry into the…

Tasmania is emerging as a global centre for bitcoin mining, with firms lured by its 200 per cent renewable energy target, but the boom could spell trouble for other energy-intensive industries. New bitcoin miner Digital Asset Mining Enterprise (DAME), said it planned to set up a global-scale operation in 2022 in Northern Tasmania, home to existing player Firmus. More are tipped to follow, as bitcoin miners – who collectively use more energy than some developed countries to power and cool supercomputers – flock to renewables, countering criticism that they drive global greenhouse gas emissions. Bitcoin miners use fast, powerful, energy-hungry…

Last month Josh Frydenberg foreshadowed sweeping changes to Australia’s payment systems, including a proposal to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges. To promote community trust and confidence in payments, there needs to be a greater focus on better protecting Australians from ballooning scam losses. Payment systems – the pipes of the finance system that allow us to transfer money electronically at a click of a button – represent the closest thing to a public utility in the finance system. That’s why safety should be a core principle underlying those systems. Unfortunately, while payment systems have innovated over the last 20 years, most recently…

The richest and most successful Australian you’ve never heard of makes money from foreign exchange and cryptocurrency trading, lives in a luxury Cyprus marina and recently got a whopping $906m dividend payment. Meet the little-known forex and contract-for-difference broker who got paid more than billionaires like Gina Rinehart and Kerry Stokes, and posted bigger profits that companies such as Atlassian, Nine Entertainment and Crown Resorts IC Markets founder Andrew Budzinski is the 46-year-old head of what claims to be the world’s largest forex broker operating in 200 countries and is quickly working his way up the billionaire ranks of The List…

On a pig farm across the road from the open pit of the Callide coalmine near Biloela in central Queensland, mining of a very different sort is under way. In this unlikeliest of places, in an unused shed surrounded by thousands of pigs, father-and-son farmers Paul and Laurie Brosnan are mining cryptocurrency. Even rarer is the fact that they are doing it in an environmentally friendly way, using excess energy from their on-farm biogas plant to power the computers that generate new bitcoin. It’s normally a painstaking, costly and energy-sapping process, but the yield can be profitable, especially when it’s…

You have to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg. When the founder of Facebook announced in October that he was changing the name of the social-media network’s parent company to Meta Platforms in order to help create an alternative digital reality known as the metaverse, he was mercilessly mocked. T o some, he was generating a smokescreen to distract attention from a political furore. To others, he was merely the latest middle-aged tech billionaire to chase a childhood fantasy, much as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk were doing with space rockets. And yet his timing was impeccable. Since October…