Digital Assets Framework Act: what it changes for a Queensland lot

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Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

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Take a three-bedroom house in Townsville, owned by a company that offers the public digital tokens described as shares in it. Until this year, the only federal question asked of that offer was an old one: is the token a financial product under the Corporations Act? Since April 2026 there has been a second layer. Federal Parliament has passed the Digital Assets Framework Act 2026, which creates two new regulated kinds of platform and sets a start date for licensing them.

Property people now hear the Act cited as if it settled how a tokenised Queensland property works. It does something narrower. It regulates the businesses that hold tokens for clients. It does not rewrite the land register, the transfer of a lot, State duty, land tax or a lease. This guide sets out what the Act creates, as the Treasury ministers, a Senate committee and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) describe it, then its timetable and ASIC's transitional position as it stood on 25 August 2026. The second half goes point by point through what remains governed by other law for a Queensland house, unit or block of land.

One caution on sources. The fullest plain descriptions of the new law were written about the bill, before it passed: the ministers' announcement of 26 November 2025 and the first chapter of the Senate Economics Legislation Committee's report. This guide says each time which document a point comes from. Where the detail matters to a real offer, the Act itself is the text to read.

What Parliament passed, and when

The law began as the Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill 2025. The name says where it sits: it amends the Corporations Act, the same federal statute that already governs financial products, licensing and managed investment schemes. The Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services, Daniel Mulino, and the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, announced the bill in a joint release dated 26 November 2025.

The Senate referred the bill to its Economics Legislation Committee on 5 February 2026, with a report due by 16 March 2026, according to the first chapter of that committee's report. ASIC's news item of 4 May 2026 gives the rest of the dates. The Digital Assets Framework Act 2026 passed Parliament on 1 April 2026, received Royal Assent on 8 April 2026 and is to commence on 9 April 2027.

ASIC sums up the result in one line: the Act introduces a licensing and supervision framework for digital asset platforms and tokenised custody platforms. Everything else in the new law hangs on those two terms.

Two new kinds of platform

The Senate committee's chapter sets out the definitions the bill used. They start with the digital token itself: an electronic record that a person can factually control, or one prescribed by regulations. Factual control, in the committee's summary, means being able to transfer the record, to stop others from transferring it, and to show that one can do both.

A digital asset platform is then described as a facility in which the operator possesses digital tokens that are held for clients, whether as trustee, as bailee or under an obligation to follow instructions, and records the clients' interests in accounts. In plain terms it is the business model in which the customer does not hold the token personally. The operator holds it and keeps a ledger of who is entitled to what.

A tokenised custody platform is a different thing, and the one closest to the property conversation. The committee describes it as a facility that creates one digital token for each underlying asset, where possession of the token gives a right to redeem or take delivery of the asset, and where a strict one-to-one relationship between token and asset is kept.

Applied to the Townsville house, the two definitions point at two different businesses. If an operator holds the house tokens for investors and shows each investor a balance in an account, the definition of a digital asset platform is the one to test. If an operator holds an asset and issues a single token that stands for it, redeemable for it, the tokenised custody definition is the one to test. Whether a particular arrangement meets either definition depends on its own facts and on the wording of the Act as passed. Neither definition says anything about what the underlying asset is in Queensland law. That is a separate question, taken up below.

The licence and the duties attached to it

The ministers' release states the central requirement briefly: both kinds of platform must hold an Australian financial services (AFS) licence. The Senate committee's chapter adds the legal hook. Operators who provide financial services in relation to these platforms need the licence and must comply with the general obligations of AFS licensees in section 912A of the Corporations Act.

The release lists what follows for a licensed platform: to act efficiently, honestly and fairly; to respect the prohibitions on misleading or deceptive conduct and on unfair contract terms; to give customers clear information about how their assets are held and what rights they have; to maintain governance and risk controls; and to offer dispute resolution and compensation arrangements.

The committee's chapter describes three further mechanisms in the bill:

• Asset-holding standards. ASIC may make standards on how a platform possesses and safeguards assets, keeps records, reconciles and reports.
• Transactional and settlement standards. ASIC may make standards on how client transactions are executed and settled.
• A platform guide. Operators must give retail clients a guide to the platform before issuing it to them, containing the information a person would reasonably need to decide whether to take part.

The same chapter says ASIC's existing powers over financial products, product intervention orders among them, are applied to the two platform types, and that a licensee's failure to comply with the standards, or to give the guide, attracts civil penalties.

For a property professional the practical reading is this. The new duties fall on the platform operator, and they concern how tokens are held, how trades are handled and what the customer is told about the platform. None of the three documents describes a duty about the house: its condition, its title, its tenancy or its value.

The size exemption, as two documents put it

The bill carried an exemption for small operators, and the two descriptions of it are not identical.

The ministers' release of 26 November 2025 says smaller, low-risk platforms are exempt if they hold less than $5,000 per customer and facilitate less than $10 million in transactions a year. Both conditions appear together in that sentence.

The Senate committee's chapter, describing the bill's text, records one figure: an issuer of a digital asset platform need not hold an AFS licence if the total market value of transactions across all its platforms does not exceed $10 million over a 12-month period. The per-customer figure does not appear in that chapter.

This guide does not reconcile the two. The reader who needs to know whether a small operator falls outside the licensing requirement has to take the thresholds from the Act as passed and from any regulations. One point is worth making about the arithmetic, though. A transaction ceiling of $10 million a year is small against property values. On the committee's description, the test counts the total market value of transactions across all of an operator's platforms, so an operator handling token sales for a handful of Queensland houses could approach that figure quickly.

From bill to start date

The dates published so far fit together as a single sequence. The committee's chapter says the bill provided for commencement on the day after the end of a period of 12 months beginning on the day after Royal Assent. With assent on 8 April 2026, that formula gives the 9 April 2027 date that ASIC has published.

Commencement is not the end of the runway. The committee's chapter says the bill gave a six-month transition period after commencement for the financial services amendments, and ASIC's item of 4 May 2026 speaks of an 18-month implementation timeline. Twelve months to commencement plus six months of transition makes eighteen. This guide gives no calendar date for the end of that transition, because none of the documents read for it states one.

As of 25 August 2026, then, the new platform licensing regime is law but not yet in operation. An offer made today for tokens in a Queensland property is not regulated by it. It is regulated by the law that already existed, and that is where ASIC's transitional position comes in.

Where ASIC's position stood on 25 August 2026

Before the Act, ASIC had already revised its guidance on when a digital asset is a financial product. That guidance is Information Sheet 225, "Digital assets: Financial products and services", which ASIC's website shows as last modified on 30 April 2026. Alongside it, ASIC gave digital asset businesses a class no-action position: time to work out whether they needed an AFS licence, or a variation of one, and to apply.

ASIC's news item of 4 May 2026 set the deadline at 30 June 2026. Firms had to apply for a licence by then or, for market or clearing and settlement facility licences, notify ASIC that they intended to apply. The item warned that operating without the right licence risks a breach of the financial services laws, with penalties that could reach 10% of annual turnover.

On 25 June 2026 ASIC extended the position to 30 September 2026. A summary published by the law firm blog Regulation Tomorrow reports that ASIC called the extension a pragmatic decision in light of industry transition challenges, and that it widened the position to cover businesses operating under authorised representative or intermediary arrangements with an AFS licence holder. By 30 September 2026, on that summary, a firm must have lodged an AFS licence application, obtained a variation of its licence or put such an arrangement in place. Firms needing a market or clearing and settlement facility licence must notify ASIC in writing, attend a pre-meeting and lodge within 12 months.

The distinction matters for the Townsville house. If the token is already a financial product under the tests in Information Sheet 225, the business offering it has been inside the existing licensing law all along, and the September date is the one that bears on it. The April 2027 date adds a further question about the platform on which the token is held.

The register and the transfer stay with Queensland

Nothing in the Treasury release, the committee's chapter or ASIC's items mentions a land register. The Queensland position is found in the Land Title Act 1994, and its opening provisions are enough to show why a federal platform licence does not reach the title.

Section 7 of that Act has the Registrar of Titles keep a land registry, which includes the freehold land register. Section 27 requires the Registrar to keep that register. Section 28 lists what must be recorded in it: the particulars that identify every lot, every registered interest, the names of the proprietors and the registered instruments with their lodgement and registration dates. Section 37 then says an indefeasible title for a lot is created on the recording of the particulars of the lot in the freehold land register.

Section 8 is the provision that draws most attention in technology discussions. It allows a register to be kept in any form the Registrar considers appropriate, including a form that is not a document, and lets the Registrar change the form. That is a power of the Registrar over the State's own register. It is not a doorway through which a private ledger becomes the register.

Put together, these sections describe a closed loop. The owner of the Townsville house is whoever is recorded as proprietor in a register kept by a State officer. A token holder appears there only if a registered instrument puts that person's name on the title. A sale of tokens between two investors changes the platform's ledger and leaves the freehold land register as it was. A platform licensed under the new federal categories would still be a platform holding tokens; the proprietor of the lot would still be the company or trustee named in the register.

Pooled ownership is still tested as a scheme

The second thing the Act leaves in place is the older test in the Corporations Act for a managed investment scheme. Information Sheet 225 describes it in three elements: people contribute money or money's worth for a right to benefits; the contributions are pooled or used in a common enterprise; and the contributors do not have day-to-day control.

The sheet includes a worked example on tokenised real estate. A company issues tokens representing part interests in an apartment building, uses investors' money to buy the property, holds it as nominee, leases the apartments, keeps the profit after costs in an account for that building and may buy tokens back. ASIC's conclusion is that the token is likely to be an interest in a managed investment scheme. The wording is cautious, as it is throughout the sheet, but the direction is plain. The issuer of interests in a scheme, the sheet says, must hold an AFS licence authorising it to act as a responsible entity. Retail clients bring the usual set of protections with them: a Product Disclosure Statement, design and distribution obligations, dispute resolution and compensation arrangements.

The new Act does interact with this at one point. The Senate committee's chapter notes that the bill excluded tokenised custody platforms from managed investment scheme regulation where specified criteria are met. That exclusion is drawn around the custody platform, the one-to-one arrangement in which a token stands for an asset and can be redeemed for it. It is not described as a general exemption for anything recorded as a token. An arrangement that pools money from many investors to buy and rent out a Queensland house still has to be measured against the three elements above.

So the Townsville offer may face two federal questions rather than one. Is the token an interest in a scheme, with all that follows for the issuer? And is the facility on which the tokens are held one of the two new platform types, with all that follows for its operator from April 2027?

Duty, land tax and the lease do not move

The new law is an amendment to the Corporations Act. Queensland's revenue laws are State laws administered by the Queensland Revenue Office (QRO), and nothing in the federal material read for this guide refers to them.

On duty, the QRO's own pages show which transactions it looks at. Transfer duty is charged on a published scale, and the office's rates page works through the example of a house bought for $850,000. A separate QRO page deals with interests in trusts: buying units in a unit trust that holds Queensland property is a trust acquisition, and duty is calculated on the dutiable value of the interest acquired. A third deals with landholder duty, which applies to acquisitions of a significant interest in a corporation or listed unit trust that has land-holdings in Queensland with an unencumbered value of $2 million or more. None of those pages mentions tokens. They are written in terms of land, trust interests and interests in landholders, so the legal form behind a token is what the reader has to identify first.

On land tax, the QRO page for companies and trusts says liability is assessed at midnight on 30 June each year on the taxable value of the land, and that companies and trustees pay once that value reaches $350,000. The bill goes to the entity that owns the land. In the Townsville example that is the company or trustee, not the holders of the tokens.

On the tenancy, the federal documents are silent. If the house is rented, the lease is between the tenant and the owner, and it sits under Queensland's tenancy laws. A change in who holds tokens does not change who the owner is, for the reasons given in the section on the register.

Reading an offer against the new law

For an agent, conveyancer or valuer shown a tokenised offer over a Queensland property between now and April 2027, the documents above suggest a short sequence of factual questions. They are questions to put, not conclusions to draw, and none of them replaces legal or licensed financial advice on a particular offer.

1. Who is the registered proprietor of the lot? A title search answers this, and it identifies the entity that every other question refers back to.
2. What does the token give its holder in law: a share in a company, a unit in a trust, an interest in a scheme, or a right to redeem an asset?
3. Does the issuer say the token is a financial product, and which licence does it hold or has it applied for under ASIC's no-action position?
4. Who holds the tokens: the investor, or an operator that keeps accounts for clients? That is the fact the new platform definitions turn on.
5. Does the operator claim the size exemption, and on which thresholds?
6. Which Queensland duty and land tax consequences has the issuer identified for the structure, and who bears them?

The Act adds a regulated layer around the fourth and fifth questions. The first, second and sixth were answered by other law before 2026 and will be answered by the same law after 9 April 2027.

The new federal law licenses the business that holds the token. The lot the token points to is still found in a register kept in Queensland.

ASIC has said that Information Sheet 225 may be updated as the reforms are finalised, and the standards the regulator may make under the Act had not been described in the documents read for this guide. Until they are, the published record consists of the dates, the two definitions, the licensing requirement and the exemption figures set out above.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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