Australia spots AI, somehow forgets the wallets agents will pay with 🧾

Australia's latest Intergenerational Report, published Monday by the Australian Treasury, named artificial intelligence as one of five major economic transitions expected over the next 40 years, with no mention of crypto. The other identified transitions are geopolitical conflicts, an aging population, a shift to clean energy and Australia's industrial transformation toward services.

The report described agentic AI systems as having become "significantly" more capable, autonomous and widely used, surpassing human-level performance on some benchmarks. Coinbase Australia country director John O'Loghlen said in emailed comments that "the Intergenerational Report makes it clear that Australia's prosperity over the next 40 years will depend heavily on our ability to adopt new technology and lift productivity," adding that "while the report focuses heavily on artificial intelligence, it completely misses the financial infrastructure those agents will need." Previous Intergenerational Reports have also not addressed digital assets.

The omission came despite the Reserve Bank of Australia increasing its focus on tokenized finance and financial infrastructure upgrades earlier this year, while the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre estimated digital finance innovations could generate 24 billion Australian dollars ($17.1 billion) in annual economic gains.

Treasury's separate Financial Innovation Strategy, released on Sept. 3, does address the link between AI and financial infrastructure, stating that agentic systems could increase automated and machine-to-machine transactions and create greater demand for real-time, interoperable and programmable payment systems. A related Australian draft payments vision has also examined stablecoin interoperability.

"We've made good progress in recent years, including through the Digital Asset Platform framework, which has provided necessary regulatory clarity," O'Loghlen said, adding that "the opportunity now is to bring the same focus to the tokenized stored-value facility framework for stablecoins, and clear rules for tokenized markets." He concluded that "those are the rails digital finance — agentic finance included — will run on and getting them right is how Australia turns this opportunity into reality."