International cryptocurrency exchange Bitget has continued to actively market its high-risk products to Australians — including on university campuses — despite the country's corporate regulator publicly warning consumers about the platform's unlicensed crypto-asset futures, an ABC News investigation has detailed.
Bitget, which boasts 120 million users worldwide, has held multiple events around the country since the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) issued its July alarm. According to ABC, those events have at points specifically targeted university students, including a function at the University of New South Wales' Roundhouse earlier this month. Its own marketing materials describe it as the number one platform for buying Bitcoin in Australia.
ASIC's original warning centred on leverage. The regulator told consumers Bitget was offering crypto-asset futures with leverage as high as 125 times the value of an investor's stake. By comparison, ASIC caps leverage on certain crypto-asset derivative products at 2:1 for retail clients, a guardrail explicitly designed to prevent rapid wipeouts.
The regulator's statement was unambiguous about Bitget's standing. "Bitget does not hold an Australian Financial Services (AFS) licence, meaning it is not permitted to promote or encourage Australian investors to invest in its financial products," ASIC said.
Bitget itself has been openly building its Australian pipeline. At a global crypto conference in November, Bitget chief marketing officer Ignacio Aguirre Franco told the audience he expected the next generation of Australians to be onboarded into crypto before they had a bank account.
"We do feel that a lot of the people of these new generations maybe are going to have a crypto exchange account before they even have a bank," Franco said.
That onboarding pitch has unsettled financial professionals who watch products marketed to inexperienced investors. Wealth management professional Nathan Ide told ABC the structure of high-leverage offshore platforms made the risk asymmetry clear before a single trade was placed.
"Tools like [Bitget] aren't there to make investors money, they're there to make platforms, crypto exchanges money," Ide said. "And an inexperienced investor can get hurt pretty badly if they don't know the rules."
The gap that practitioners are pointing to is the lag between an ASIC warning and an enforceable licensing regime. Australia's first comprehensive digital-assets legislation set the end of June as the cutoff by which digital-asset platforms must comply with the country's financial-services licensing requirements. Until that date, ASIC's leverage cap and licensing perimeter sit alongside an active offshore promotional apparatus that the regulator is, in its own words, still considering.
When ABC asked the regulator whether it was aware of the Bitget events touring the country since the original warning, an ASIC spokesperson would only confirm the matter remained open. "ASIC is currently considering these matters further, in line with its normal approach," the spokesperson said.
The Bitget situation is shaping up as an early test of how Australia's incoming digital-assets regime handles international platforms that decline to seek a local licence but continue to chase Australian users through events, social media and campus marketing. ASIC has previously made clear that operating outside the licensing perimeter does not, on its own, stop a platform from being marketed inside it — only enforcement does.
For wealth professionals, the more pressing issue is the demographic skew. University students attending crypto events on campus are precisely the cohort least likely to recognise that 125-times leverage is not a feature but a tail-risk distribution centred on losing the entire stake on a small adverse move. Ide's warning that an "inexperienced investor can get hurt pretty badly" is, in that frame, the simple version of a regulatory equation that Bitget's CMO appears comfortable to push the other way.
With the June compliance deadline looming and ASIC publicly noting it has the file open, the period between now and then is shaping up as the closing window in which an unlicensed offshore exchange can, in practice, run an Australian roadshow without consequence — and on the evidence of the past several months, Bitget is using that window aggressively.