This “Crypto City” guide looks at Melbourne’s crypto culture, the city’s most notable projects and people, its financial infrastructure, which retailers accept crypto and where you can find blockchain education courses — and there’s even a short history with all the juicy details of famous controversies and collapses.
Updated: May 2023.
Fast facts
City: Melbourne
Country: Australia
Population: 5.15M
Established: 1835
Australia’s second-largest city may lack Sydney’s amazing harbor views, but it makes up for it with a focus on art, sports and culture. There are more live music venues here per capita than any other city in the world, and the city has produced heaps of notable acts, including Nick Cave, Men at Work, The Avalanches and Kylie Minogue.
Located on the southern coast of Australia, Melbourne wasn’t founded until almost 50 years after Sydney, but it quickly became the wealthiest place in the world during the Gold Rush, from the 1850s to 1880s. It’s a very multicultural city, with the 10th-largest immigrant population globally. The city also ranks at number 27 on the Global Financial Centers Index and is home to the Australian Rules football code, the Australian Grand Prix and the Australian Open. It was the filming location for the first Mad Max film alongside Chopper and Animal Kingdom. Politically, Melbourne is more left-wing than any other city in the country and is home to the union movement.
Crypto culture
Melbourne embraced cryptocurrencies early on, and a thriving community was built up through regular meetups, including Blockchain Melbourne, Women in Blockchain, Web3 Melbourne and futureAUS. Karen Cohen, the deputy chairperson of Blockchain Australia, recalls there being a huge influx of newcomers during the ICO boom in 2017.
“The meetup culture was really exciting. We couldn’t get enough space, so people were watching our meetups on Facebook Live because they couldn’t get into the room because it was so busy.”
Talk & Trade meetups were held every Wednesday from 2015 to 2019 at the Blockchain Centre. Located at the Victorian Innovation Hub in the docklands, the Blockchain Centre was the heart of the community in real life, at least until the coronavirus pandemic struck.
Melbourne has been home to numerous crypto exchanges since 2013, and a plethora of ICOs were also founded in the city in 2017 and 2018, including CanYa, which operates the freelancer platform CanWork, and blockchain voting company Horizon State.
The pandemic moved most things online for a couple of years, but Blockchain Australia hosted a series of events at YBF Ventures in the Melbourne central business district (CBD) for the national Blockchain Week in 2020, and Talk & Trade was held at RMIT in between lockdowns. YBF Ventures sadly didn’t make it through the pandemic, though.
The pandemic is now a grim memory for most, so events have returned. While the physical Blockchain Centre is no more, there are alternatives for IRL crypto events: the Melbourne Bitcoin Only club holds regular pub nights and celebrations for Bitcoin Pizza Day; while the Australian DeFi Association, Women in Blockchain, Algorand Foundation and numerous other crypto and blockchain groups also hold regular events. Solana held a recent hacker house event.
Blockchain Australia’s Blockchain Week invariably holds events in Melbourne, including at Oshi Gallery and Deloitte in June this year.
The Australian Open recreated Melbourne Park in Decentraland in early 2022, marking the first official tennis grand slam in the metaverse.
While there was much excitement about the 12 crypto regulation reforms recommended by a Senate Inquiry report into Australia as a Technology and Financial Centre in October 2021, progress stalled after a new government was elected. Liberal senator Andrew Bragg submitted a private members bill in March 2023 to progress the reforms, without success.
Projects and companies
Melbournites appear very interested in solving the problem of interblockchain communication, with at least three major cross-chain projects having strong ties to the city. CanYa founder JP Thor helped found the cross-chain decentralized liquidity protocol THORChain, and some of the anonymous local devs from THORChain went on to work on a similar project called Sifchain. Melbourne’s Simon Harman founded another cross-chain automated market maker, Chainflip, along with the privacy project Loki, which is now known as Oxen.
White-label blockchain services provider Pellar is located in Melbourne, whose infrastructure processes 10 million requests a day from around the world. Researchers from the government-run Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and Monash University invented the MatRiCT technology (licensed to Hcash), which protects crypto from being cracked by quantum computers. NFT digital racehorse game Zed Run raised $20 million from investors, including TCG and Andreessen Horowitz, and became successful enough to be featured in The New York Times. Algorand also has a noticeable presence in Melbourne, including through the Meld gold platform and Algomint. Zerocap is an institution focused OTC, custody and funds management business.
Dear Elon,
Best regards.
Chris Hemsworth, @THORChain CEO, 2021 pic.twitter.com/4MDli8anpW— Konscio (@konscios) May 14, 2021
Crypto exchanges headquartered in Melbourne include BTC Markets, Cointree, CoinSpot, CoinJar, Coinstop, noncustodial exchange Elbaite and OTC service Caleb and Brown. Major global fiat-to-crypto on-ramp Banxa is also based in the city along with Crypto.com‘s Australian HQ.
Up-and-coming projects include insurance platform Day By Day, onboarding and fraud protection platform FrankieOne, pre-IPO & pre-token trading platform PrePO and accounting software AEM. DeFi-focused crypto fund — which is a big investor in Synthetix and Internet Computer, among others — is also based in Melbourne. Apollo’s chief investment officer, Henrik Andersson, co-founded the decentralized pool trading platform dHEDGE and yield platform mStable (and helped out with a few ideas for this guide). They invested in blockchain gaming and eSports organization Perion DAO. Upside DAO has launched a Web3 incubator in Crenmore, and key members of the DAO come from Ren Protocol, Synthetix, dHedge and Caleb and Brown. There’s also a new physical Web3 networking and education club called Pixel Boss in Armadale and innovation and skills game Polynize.io.
Other projects include blockchain development and consulting company Blockchain Australia (not the industry body), payments platform PayScript.io, IT and tech company Asta, institutional undercollateralized loans platform Maple, Shopping app and currency Shping and the blockchain jobs platform LaborX. Authentium.io is building a global supply chain solution.
In mid-2022, Thailand-based metaverse startup Translucia Global Innovation announced a partnership with Melbourne software devs Two Bulls to build a Metaverse Research and Development Center (MRDC) in Melbourne. As of March 2023, Translucia had launched a website.
OKX announced during the Melbourne Grand Prix in 2023 that it was planning to open in Australia.
Oshi Gallery in Collingwood provides a focal point for the NFT community, with regular exhibitions and events.
Financial infrastructure
The first Bitcoin ATM was installed at the Emporium in 2014, and there are now 87 Bitcoin ATMs and tellers dotted around Melbourne, according to coinatmradar. Australian banks have a slightly wary approach to crypto — while many banks are happy to allow users to send funds to exchanges, plenty of users have reported being suddenly debanked, especially those running crypto-related businesses. “They close accounts at will based on crypto use, and we’ve seen that happen, so they’re still not supportive as an industry,” says Cohen.
The New Payments Platform in Australia is something of a competitor to crypto (at least in terms of payments), allowing instant, 24/7 bank transfers using a phone number or email address. Often referred to as PayID, it was cited by the Reserve Bank of Australia as a reason that a central bank digital currency is not needed in Australia just yet – although the RBA subsequently announced a pilot to test out a CBDC involving the major banks. ANZ and NAB have both announced Australian stablecoins, but debanking remains a live issue for many crypto firms.
There are hundreds of retailers here in the Blueshyft network (Synthetix founder Kain Warwick’s other project) that accept cash payments over-the-counter for crypto exchanges.
Where can I spend crypto?
According to Coinmap, more than 100 businesses accept crypto payments in Melbourne. Their numbers took a dive during the pandemic, though. Many retailers used the crypto payment service from TravelbyBit; however, that service was dropped after the company merged with Travala in mid-2020.
Still, you can get a haircut at the Barber of Seville in Richmond, learn rock climbing at Melbourne Climbing School, get fit at the women’s-only Fernwood Gym in Bulleen, get your computer fixed at Another World Computer Centre in Coburg, visit Japanese wellness clinic Sensu Spa or get a remedial massage from the Doctors of Osteo in Hawthorn East.
Despite the lack of merchants accepting direct crypto payments, you can pay for pretty much everything in Melbourne using crypto via intermediary services that transform it into cash. Living Room of Satoshi lets you pay any Bpay biller or bank account using 18 different cryptocurrencies.
Education
RMIT University’s Blockchain Innovation Hub studies the social and business implications of blockchain, while Monash University’s Blockchain Technology Centre provides training and conducts research. There’s a Blockchain Innovation Lab at Swinburne University and Deakin University, both of which conduct research.
Controversies and collapses
Auscoin was perhaps the most controversial project to emerge from the city. Founded by Lambo-driving souvlaki chain-store owner Sam Karagiozis, the token was created to fund the rollout of 1,200 Bitcoin ATMs. The Aussie version of 60 Minutes dubbed it an “$80 million scam” that was built on nothing more than “grandiose promises,” although the ICO only raised $2 million. Auscoin was ordered by AUSTRAC to cease operations after Karagiozis was charged with trafficking 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of drugs via the dark web.
Elsewhere, up to 200 investors lost about $10 million between them when Melbourne-based crypto exchange ACX mysteriously collapsed at the end of 2019. It was operated by Blockchain Global, whose founder, Sam Lee, was instrumental in setting up the Blockchain Centre.
Another local exchange that mysteriously folded was MyCryptoWallet. Founded in 2017, the platform had its accounts frozen by National Australia Bank in early 2019. The exchange found alternate banking services and recovered temporarily, but later that year, users found they had lost access to their funds. The liquidators were finally called in in December 2021. Huobi Australia launched in Melbourne in 2018 but quickly shuttered due to a lack of business during crypto winter. Horizon State, a promising blockchain-based voting platform, launched in Melbourne and then moved to New Zealand, where it was on the verge of doing great things when a mysterious court case back in Melbourne scuppered the entire project.
The website remains but has not been updated since October 2021.
In August 2022, it was revealed that Crypto.com accidentally sent $10.5 million to Melbourne investors, instead of the planned $100 refund and didn’t notice for six months.
Australia’s youngest billionaire, Ed Craven, founded the Stake.com crypto casino and made headlines by breaking Melbourne’s house price record with a $54 million purchase in Toorak. He was sued for $400 million by former colleague Christopher Freeman, who alleged he was pushed out of the business.
BREAKING: Auscoin founder, Sam Karagiozis, faces charges of trafficking cocaine, ice and other drugs, but he has now been granted bail to attend his brother's wedding. https://t.co/aGuzMRcYcR
— The Greek Herald (@greek_herald) January 5, 2021
Notable figures
Ethereum influencer Anthony Sassano; Cryptopia filmmaker Torsten Hoffmann, BTC Markets CEO Caroline Bowler; Apollo Capital chief investment officer Henrik Andersson; A. J. Milne of Meld Ventures and Algomint; former Blockchain Australia CEO Steve Vallas; Women in Blockchain International manager Akasha Rose; CanYa and THORChain founder JP Thor; “Satoshi’s sister,” Lisa Edwards; Blockchain Centre founder Sam Lee (also of the now-defunct ACX); RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub professor Jason Potts; Joseph Liu, director of the Monash Blockchain Technology Centre and inventor of the tech behind Monero; “blockchain educator of 2021,” Dr. Dimitrios Salampasis from Swinburne Business School; Oxen chief technology officer Kee Jefferys; AlgoHub founder Karen Cohen; tokenomics expert Anouk Pinchetti; Law Defi DAO founder Joni Pirovich, Genesis Blockc founder Chloe White, Elbaite co-founder Samira Tollo; head of digital products at the International Chamber of Commerce, Nick Byrne; Auscoin founder Sam Karagiozis; and blockchain law specialists Joni Pirovich of Mills Oakley and John Bassilios of Hall & Wilcox. CEO of Asta and Day by Day, Bill Angelidis, Marhaba founder Naquib Mohammed, Crypto.com’s APAC general manager, Karl Mohan; Stake.com crypto casino co-founder Ed Craven.
Cointelegraph team members and contributors based in Melbourne: Andrew Fenton and Tom Mitchelhill.
Suggestions for additions to this guide are welcome. Please email: andrewfenton@cointelegraph.com
Andrew Fenton
Ex-Alameda hire on ‘pressure’ to not blow up Backpack exchange: Armani Ferrante, X Hall of Flame