Will Australia be the site of our next global standard for crypto pricing?
Global trading platform Pepperstone has chosen Australia as the launch market for its proprietary new spot cryptocurrency exchange, placing the country at the centre of its broader crypto expansion strategy across the 160 or so countries in which it operates.
To be clear, this is no small thing for Australia.
Pepperstone has been operating since 2010 and now processes around US$6 billion in monthly crypto CFDs.
Its broader global trading business serves over 830,000 traders globally, and gives clients access to thousands of markets across major asset classes.
Its global CEO, Tamas Szabo, has spent three decades building and operating trading platforms through multiple regulatory reform cycles in leveraged derivatives.
Its Head of Crypto, Hsann Naing, has decades of experience building and operating global exchanges, in addition to multiple senior roles across Coins.ph, Binance and IBM.
Naing led the team who built the Pepperstone Spot Cryptocurrency Exchange inhouse, a rare situation for a digital asset exchange where the build is often outsourced and therefore sits off the company’s balance sheet, offering less flexibility around pricing and other design aspects.
In the world of traditional financial services, Pepperstone Crypto is a global mainstay.
Its strategic direction therefore serves as a bellwether for the direction of financial services as a whole, as opposed to that of one single institution. So its investment into digital assets could provide the broader market with a sign of what’s to come for financial services as a whole.
The launch also gives Australian traders access to spot crypto trading through a platform built by a global trading group rather than a crypto native operator.
So what exactly can we learn about Australia that helped it stand out above its global peers to Pepperstone Crypto?
I sat down with Szabo and Naing to find out more.
1) Australia already behaves like a mature crypto market
When I spoke with Szabo and Naing, both made the same underlying point in different ways: Australia already looks like a market where crypto is being absorbed into mainstream investing behaviour.
Around one in three adults hold digital assets, more than half of Australians aged 25 to 34 actively hold crypto, self managed super funds have allocated more than $1.6 billion to the sector, and Bitcoin exchange traded funds on the ASX have attracted sustained inflows.
The level of crypto adoption Australia has already reached gives Pepperstone Crypto a live market in which to test whether clearer pricing can shift trader behaviour.
That does not describe a fringe market.
It describes one where investors are starting to bring the same expectations to digital assets that they already bring to equities, foreign exchange and other established asset classes.
That maturity is why the crypto market Australia represents is becoming more important to global trading platforms.
As Szabo put it, “Investor expectations in crypto are now being shaped by their experience in traditional markets, particularly around execution quality, governance, and cost transparency”.
Naing sees the same shift from the trading desk, arguing that “as more active traders move between asset classes, consistency in execution and transparency in pricing will become a baseline expectation rather than a point of differentiation”.
2) The pricing gap is now too large to ignore
This was the sharpest part of the conversation.
Pepperstone’s analysis found Australians are paying up to 500 percent more in total trading costs in some cases once spreads are properly taken into account. That goes to the heart of how much of the crypto market still presents pricing to investors.
Szabo told me that “many existing exchanges still rely on complex fee structures and internal pricing models that make it difficult for traders to understand their true cost of execution, particularly as volumes increase”.
Naing was even more direct about the structural problem: “Crypto market structure has historically prioritised access and liquidity over pricing clarity, which has led to fragmented execution and inconsistent trading costs for end users.”
That is why Pepperstone Crypto is centring this launch on a flat commission model and upfront disclosure of both commissions and spreads.
In Naing’s words, “a simplified commission model, combined with tight spreads, allows traders to separate execution cost from market movement and make more informed decisions, particularly in volatile conditions”.
Pepperstone Crypto’s view is that retail and active traders are beginning to expect institutional-grade crypto infrastructure, even when trading smaller volumes.
In other words, this is not simply a new product launch. It is an attempt to raise the standard of what investors should expect to see.
3) Regulation is moving closer to what serious investors already expect
Australia also stood out because the policy direction is beginning to match the maturity of the market itself.
The proposed Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill 2025 has also made digital asset regulation Australia a more important consideration for global operators watching the market.
Szabo told me that “Australia is one of the few markets where those expectations are already reflected in both investor behaviour and regulatory direction, which creates a clear gap between what traders require and what most crypto platforms currently provide”.
That gap points to the existence of strong underlying demand.
Around 30 percent of investors report friction from banking restrictions, while between two and six million more Australians are estimated to be waiting for greater regulatory clarity before entering the market.
Australia is therefore not just regulating for a hypothetical future user, rather for a market that already exists and is still expanding.
4) Australia has the scale to influence what comes next
The final reason Australia matters is that it is large and developed enough to shape broader market expectations.
The domestic ecosystem now includes over 400 registered digital currency providers and over 1,200 crypto ATMs. At the same time, digital assets are intersecting more visibly with traditional finance through listed exchange traded products, superannuation exposure and growing institutional participation.
That matters because institutional crypto trading standards often influence what active retail traders later expect from the platforms they use.
Szabo told me, “We see crypto evolving into a core component of multi asset trading portfolios, and that requires infrastructure, pricing discipline, and risk frameworks that can operate consistently across asset classes”.
Naing made the operational case for that shift, saying, “Our approach is to apply the same execution and risk standards used in established asset classes, including how liquidity is sourced and how trades are priced and filled”.
If those standards begin to take hold here, Australia will not simply be an early launch market, it will help define what a more mature crypto market looks like.
A word of warning
But Szabo ended our conversation with some straight talk.
Crypto is highly portable, he emphasised. So regulation and market conditions may be moving in the right direction, but demand will still flow to the product that offers the least friction.
In his words, “Regulation traditionally sets the boundaries of financial markets. But product design determines whether customers actually participate onshore within regulated frameworks, or offshore beyond them”.
I got his message, loud and clear. Australia has the chance to lead on crypto. But only if the market earns it.
