Australia’s Treasury has published its Intergenerational Report, a 40-year economic outlook that names artificial intelligence as one of five major transitions shaping the nation’s future, and does not mention cryptocurrency or digital assets anywhere in the document.
The report, released Monday, describes agentic AI systems as having become significantly more capable, autonomous and widely used than in earlier assessments. It treats AI as a structural force on the same footing as demographic change and the energy transition, with consequences for productivity, employment and government revenue stretching out to the 2060s.
The omission of crypto is striking given how much of the global financial conversation digital assets absorbed this year. Stablecoin legislation moved through the US Congress, the European Union pushed its MiCA framework into full effect, and tokenized Treasuries crossed into the billions. Australia’s own crypto industry lobbied hard for a seat at the table, and the Treasury left it out of the country’s defining long-range planning document.
What the report actually says about AI
The Intergenerational Report is Treasury’s flagship long-range forecast, published roughly every five years. It projects the economy, the budget and the population across four decades and is meant to guide policy on everything from retirement incomes to infrastructure spending. The 2026 edition identifies five major transitions, and AI is the only technology among them.
Treasury’s treatment of AI is conditional rather than celebratory. The report argues that the economic payoff depends on adoption: firms have to actually reorganize how they work around the technology for productivity gains to show up in the data. It flags the risk of a two-speed outcome, where frontier sectors capture the gains while the bulk of the economy sees little change. Skills, data infrastructure and regulatory clarity get named as the inputs Australia controls.
On employment, the report expects AI to shift the composition of work rather than eliminate it outright, with routine cognitive tasks absorbing most of the pressure. It also notes the fiscal dimension: faster productivity growth would help fund the age-related spending pressures that dominate the rest of the document.
The crypto industry’s response
Coinbase pushed back quickly. John O’Loghlen, the exchange’s country director for Australia, said in emailed comments that the report makes clear the country’s prosperity over the next 40 years depends on adopting new technology and lifting productivity. He argued the same focus should now go to a tokenized stored-value facility framework for stablecoins and clear rules for tokenized markets.
The complaint has a specific target. Australia has drafted stablecoin and tokenization rules in consultation papers over the past two years without passing them, leaving crypto firms in a holding pattern while comparable jurisdictions move. The United States passed its stablecoin law, the European Union has MiCA in force, and both Japan and Singapore have settled frameworks for foreign-issued tokens. Australian firms still operate under guidance written for a different era of the industry.
| Jurisdiction | Stablecoin framework status |
|---|---|
| United States | Federal stablecoin law passed |
| European Union | MiCA in force |
| Japan | Framework settled, trust-type exemptions proposed for 2027 |
| Singapore | Weighing recognition of foreign-issued stablecoins |
| Australia | Consultation papers, no legislation passed |
Why the omission cuts both ways
There is a defensible case for Treasury’s choice. The Intergenerational Report projects 40 years out, and crypto’s macro footprint in Australia today is small: the industry employs a few thousand people, and digital asset holdings are a rounding error next to superannuation balances and housing wealth. Forecasting documents usually ignore sectors that cannot move national accounts, and 2026 crypto valuations, however large in absolute terms, do not yet register there.
But the report also missed the direction of travel. Tokenized assets are the part of crypto that traditional finance has actually adopted, and Australia’s own securities regulator has run tokenization pilots through the year. If stablecoins and tokenized markets grow into the settlement layer Treasury’s own productivity agenda assumes, the omission will age poorly. Industry groups made exactly that argument within hours of publication.
The contrast with AI is the point. Treasury was willing to bet a 40-year forecast on a technology whose economic impact is still mostly projection. It was not willing to give crypto, which already moves real settlement volume globally, a single paragraph. That split tells the industry how Canberra ranks the two, and it will not go unanswered when the next consultation paper on tokenized markets lands.
What happens next
The report feeds into the government’s economic reform agenda and will be cited in every productivity debate for the next several years. For the crypto industry, the practical path runs through Treasury’s pending tokenization and stablecoin consultations, where industry submissions can make the case the report declined to. Coinbase’s intervention suggests those submissions are already being written.
Whether crypto makes the next Intergenerational Report in 2031 depends less on the industry’s lobbying and more on whether tokenized settlement grows large enough that ignoring it becomes statistically awkward. That is a higher bar than a headline, and it is the one that matters.
There is also a political read. Treasury reports reflect the priorities of the government that publishes them, and this government has spent its term on housing, energy and productivity rather than financial innovation. A different treasurer might have found room for digital assets in the same document. The 2026 edition tells the industry it is waiting on a political cue as much as a technical one, and that cue has not come.