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Ripple Targets Australian Financial Services License to Advance Blockchain Payments in APAC

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Brian Armstrong's Bold Prediction: AI Agents Will Soon Dominate Global Financial

TLDR:

  • Ripple will acquire BC Payments Australia Pty Ltd to secure its Australian Financial Services License in 2026.
  • The AFSL enables Ripple Payments to manage the full transaction lifecycle, from compliance to final payout settlement.
  • Ripple’s APAC payments volume nearly doubled year-on-year in 2025, reflecting strong demand across the region.
  • Ripple now holds over 75 regulatory licenses globally, making it one of the most licensed crypto firms worldwide.

Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) acquisition plans mark Ripple’s latest regulatory move in Asia Pacific. The blockchain payments company announced the strategy on March 11, 2026, in Sydney.

Ripple will obtain the license through a proposed acquisition of BC Payments Australia Pty Ltd. The move enables Ripple to deliver a fully licensed, end-to-end payments platform. Financial institutions, fintechs, and enterprises in Australia are the primary targets of this expansion.

How Ripple Plans to Secure the AFSL

The AFSL acquisition proceeds through BC Payments Australia Pty Ltd, a local entity. Standard completion processes must be finalized before the deal closes.

Once secured, the license covers the full lifecycle of a transaction. This includes onboarding, compliance, FX, liquidity management, and final payout.

Ripple Payments will integrate both traditional banking rails and digital assets under the license. Direct oversight of settlement becomes possible through this structure.

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The company can also connect customers to local payout partners more efficiently. Transaction routing optimization adds further value to the platform.

Fiona Murray, Ripple’s Managing Director for Asia Pacific, spoke directly on the development. “Licensing is fundamental to Ripple’s strategy, ensuring we can deliver secure, compliant solutions to customers worldwide,” she said.

She added that the AFSL “strengthens our ability to scale Ripple Payments across the region.” Murray further noted that the company remains “focused on working closely with regulators to support the next phase of growth for digital asset infrastructure.”

Ripple’s existing Australian customers include Hai Ha Money Transfer, Novatti Group, and Independent Reserve. Flash Payments, Caleb & Brown, and Stables also form part of that client base.

These partnerships reflect strong regional demand for Ripple’s infrastructure. APAC payments volume for the company nearly doubled year-on-year in 2025.

Ripple’s Regulatory Standing Across the APAC Region

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Ripple’s AFSL pursuit builds on a broad global licensing strategy already in place. The company is among the most licensed crypto firms operating in the world today.

Few digital asset companies operate under this level of regulatory oversight. That standing gives Ripple an advantage as institutions modernize their payment systems.

The company also participates actively in Project Acacia. This initiative is led by the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre.

Ripple works directly with regulators through the program to advance digital asset frameworks. Such engagement reflects a consistent commitment to policy collaboration across the region.

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Murray also emphasized the role of blockchain technology in delivering results for customers. “By leveraging blockchain technology and digital assets, we enable customers to move value globally with greater speed, transparency, and reliability,” she stated.

That capability is central to Ripple’s regional growth plan. It also addresses a clear need among financial institutions shifting away from legacy infrastructure.

As institutions migrate from legacy technology to modern infrastructure, regulatory compliance grows in importance. Ripple’s licensing approach supports that transition directly.

The AFSL adds credibility to Ripple’s operations in Australia. The company continues expanding its regulated footprint to meet growing regional demand.

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Crypto World

Market Analysis: EUR/USD Reclaims Ground While USD/JPY Momentum Fades

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Market Analysis: EUR/USD Reclaims Ground While USD/JPY Momentum Fades

EUR/USD is recovering losses from 1.1500. USD/JPY is correcting gains from 159.00 and might decline further if it stays below 158.30.

Important Takeaways for EUR/USD and USD/JPY Analysis Today

  • The Euro struggled to stay in a positive zone and declined below 1.1700 before finding support.
  • There was a break above a connecting bearish trend line with resistance at 1.1580 on the hourly chart of EUR/USD at FXOpen.
  • USD/JPY started a decent increase above 157.00 before the bears appeared near 158.90.
  • There is a key contracting triangle forming with resistance near 158.30 on the hourly chart at FXOpen.

EUR/USD Technical Analysis

On the hourly chart of EUR/USD at FXOpen, the pair started a fresh decline from 1.1825. The pair broke below 1.1665 and the 50-hour simple moving average. Finally, it tested the 1.1500 zone. A low was formed at 1.1507, and the pair is now recovering losses.

There was a move above 1.1550 and a connecting bearish trend line at 1.1580. The pair surpassed the 38.2% Fib retracement level of the downward move from the 1.1826 swing high to the 1.1507 low. On the upside, the pair is now facing resistance near the 50% Fib retracement at 1.1665.

The first major hurdle for the bulls could be 1.1705. A break above 1.1705 could set the pace for another increase. In the stated case, the pair might rise toward 1.1775.

If not, the pair might drop again. Immediate support is near the 50-hour simple moving average and 1.1620. The next key area of interest might be 1.1565. If there is a downside break below 1.1565, the pair could drop towards 1.1505. The main target for the bears on the EUR/USD chart could be 1.1440, below which the pair could start a major decline.

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USD/JPY Technical Analysis

On the hourly chart of USD/JPY at FXOpen, the pair gained pace for a move above 158.00. The US dollar even traded close to 159.00 against the Japanese yen before the bears emerged.

A high was formed at 158.90 before a downside correction. The pair dipped below 158.00 and the 50% Fib retracement level of the upward move from the 156.45 swing low to the 158.90 high. However, the bulls were active above 157.00 and protected the 61.8% Fib retracement.

The pair is back above the 50-hour simple moving average and 158.00. Immediate resistance on the USD/JPY chart is near 158.30. There is also a key contracting triangle at 158.30.

If there is a close above the triangle and the hourly RSI moves above 65, the pair could rise towards 158.90. The next major barrier for the bulls could be 159.25, above which the pair could test 160.00 in the near term.

On the downside, the first major support is near 158.00. The next key region for the bears might be 157.40. If there is a close below 157.40, the pair could decline steadily. In the stated case, the pair might drop towards 156.45. Any more losses might send the pair toward 155.85.

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This article represents the opinion of the Companies operating under the FXOpen brand only. It is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, or recommendation with respect to products and services provided by the Companies operating under the FXOpen brand, nor is it to be considered financial advice.

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Scaling AI Makes It Riskier

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Scaling AI Makes It Riskier

Opinion by: Mohammed Marikar, co-founder at Neem Capital

Artificial intelligence has consistently been defined by scale, so far — bigger models, faster processing, expanding data centers. The assumption, based on traditional technology cycles, was that scale would keep improving performance and, over time, costs would fall and access would expand.

That assumption is now breaking down. AI is not scaling like other software. Instead, it is capital-intensive, constrained by physical limits, and hitting diminishing returns far earlier than expected.

The numbers make this clear. Electricity demand from global data centers will more than double by 2030 — levels once associated with entire industrial sectors. In the US alone, data center power demand is projected to rise well over 100 percent before the decade ends. This expansion is demanding trillions of dollars in new investment alongside major expansions in grid capacity.

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Meanwhile, these systems are being embedded into law, finance, compliance, trading and risk management, where errors propagate quickly but credibility is non-negotiable. In June 2025, the UK High Court warned lawyers to immediately stop submitting filings that cited fabricated case law generated by AI tools.

The scaling AI debate

When an AI system can invent a precedent that never existed, and a professional relies on it, debates about scaling start becoming serious questions of public trust. Scaling is amplifying AI’s weaknesses rather than solving them.

Part of the problem lies in what scale actually improves. Large language models (LLMs) are evolving to become increasingly fluent because language is pattern-based. The more examples an LLM sees of how real people write, summarize and translate, the faster it improves.

Deeper intelligence — reasoning — does not scale the same way. The next generation of AI must understand cause and effect and know when an answer is uncertain or incomplete. It will need to explain why a conclusion follows, not simply produce a confident response. This does not reliably improve with more parameters or more compute.

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The consequence is a growing verification burden. Humans must spend more time checking machine output rather than acting on it, and that burden builds as systems are deployed more widely.

The cost of training AI models

Training frontier AI models has already become extraordinarily expensive, with credible tracking suggesting costs have been multiplying year over year, and projections that single training runs could soon exceed $1 billion. Training is only the entry cost.

The larger expense is inference: running these models continuously, at scale, with real latency, uptime and verification requirements. Every query consumes energy. Every deployment requires infrastructure. As usage grows, energy use and costs compound.

In terms of markets and crypto, AI systems are increasingly used to monitor onchain activity, analyze sentiment, generate codes for smart contracts, flag suspicious transactions and automate decisions.

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In such a fast-moving, competitive environment, fluent but unreliable AI propagates errors quickly; false signals move capital, and fabricated explanations and hallucinations undermine trust. One example of this is false positives being generated in automated Anti-Money Laundering (AML) flagging, a common issue that wastes time and resources on investigating innocent trading activity.

Time to improve reasoning

Scaling AI systems without improving their reasoning amplifies risk, especially in use cases where automation and credibility are vital and tightly coupled.

Ensuring AI is economically viable and socially valuable means we cannot rely on scaling. The dominant approach today prioritizes increasing compute and data while leaving the underlying reasoning machinery largely unchanged, a strategy that is becoming more expensive without becoming proportionally safer.

Related: Crypto dev launches website for agentic AI to ‘rent a human’

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The alternative is architectural. Systems need to do more than predict the next word. They need to represent relationships, apply rules, check their own steps and make it possible to see how conclusions were reached.

This is where cognitive or neurosymbolic systems come into play. By organizing knowledge into interrelated concepts, rather than relying solely on brute-force pattern matching, these systems can deliver high reasoning capability with far lower energy and infrastructure demands.

Emerging “cognitive AI” platforms are demonstrating how structured reasoning systems can operate on local servers or edge devices, allowing users to keep control over their own knowledge rather than outsourcing cognition to distant infrastructure.

Cognitive AI systems are harder to design and can underperform on open-ended tasks, but when reasoning is reusable in this way rather than rederived from scratch through massive compute, costs fall and verification becomes tractable.

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Control over how AI is built matters as much as how it reasons. Communities need systems they can shape, audit and deploy without waiting for permission from centralized platform owners.

Some platforms are exploring this frontier by using blockchain to enable both individuals and corporations to contribute data, models and computing resources. By decentralizing AI development itself, these approaches reduce concentration risk and align deployment with local needs rather than global demands.

AI faces an inflection point. When reasoning can be reused rather than rediscovered through massive pattern matching, systems require less compute per decision and impose a smaller verification burden on humans. That shifts the economics. Experimentation becomes cheaper, inference becomes more predictable. Scaling no longer depends on exponential increases in infrastructure.

Scaling has already done what it could. What it has exposed, just as clearly, is the limit relying on size alone. The question now is whether the industry keeps pushing scale or starts investing in architectures that make intelligence reliable before making it bigger.

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Opinion by: Mohammed Marikar, co-founder at Neem Capital.