Soda Labs

Australia

Travel rule without a threshold, no coin ban

JurisdictionAsia-PacificPrivacy with disclosure

Confidentiality is workable so long as the regulated firm can identify parties and disclose on demand.

What Australia actually says

Australia constrains confidentiality through anti-money-laundering law and not through any coin-specific rule. No Australian instrument prohibits anonymity-enhancing assets; AUSTRAC lists privacy coins, tumblers and mixers among its suspicious activity indicators, and delistings to date have been commercial and bank-driven rather than mandated. The travel rule that starts applying to virtual asset transfers on 1 July 2026 has no minimum value at all, which is stricter than most peers. Transfers to self-hosted wallets are handled as their own category rather than exempted: the sending institution must collect and verify payer information and collect payee and tracing information, with reporting on transfers to unverified self-hosted wallets starting in 2029. Retail CBDC was set aside after Project Acacia, so the retail privacy design question never arose here.

The instruments that matter

AML/CTF Amendment Act 2024
commences for existing reporting entities 31 March 2026 and for tranche 2 entities 1 July 2026, widening virtual asset services to exchange, custody, transfer and sale
Travel rule from 1 July 2026 for virtual assets
applies to every virtual asset transfer regardless of value; there is no de minimis
Self-hosted wallets handled separately
an ordering institution transferring to a self-hosted wallet must collect and verify payer information and collect payee and tracing information; reporting on transfers to unverified self-hosted wallets starts 31 March 2029
ASIC INFO 225, updated 29 October 2025
18 worked examples plus a sector-wide no-action position on licensing until 30 June 2026

What this means for confidential transactions

Bubble is built for exactly this shape of obligation: amounts and balances live on chain as ciphertexts, computation happens without decryption, and the only disclosure path is an on-chain access list through which an authorized party - an auditor, a supervisor, a counterparty - can request scoped decryption. That is confidentiality from the public, not from the regulator.

Compliant by default.

See how selective disclosure satisfies a supervisor without publishing your book to the world.