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Swyftx Acquires Caleb & Brown
Swyftx Acquires Caleb & Brown

Transaction Overview

On July 1st, 2025, Swyftx, one of the largest Australian cryptocurrency exchanges, announced a definitive agreement to acquire Caleb & Brown, a high-net-worth-focused crypto brokerage, for an undisclosed amount.

 

Target: Caleb & Brown

Caleb and Brown is a Melbourne-based, high net worth focused crypto brokerage that specializes in personalized trading services across the digital asset landscape. Caleb & Brown focuses on the relationship model used successfully across traditional  financial services – every client that comes onto their platform gets assigned a broker to assist them in executing trades  and handling all customer service needs. Caleb and Brown’s core services include 1) Brokerage Services, which provide personalized 24/7 trading support for 250+ digital assets, 2) an OTC Desk, which provides high volume trading solutions with deep liquidity and competitive pricing, 3) the Caleb and Brown Asset Management, an actively managed crypto asset fund for accredited investor, 4) crypto custody. 

 

The business has more than AUD $2 billion of digital assets under custody and was founded by Rupert Hackett and Dr. Prash Puspanathan in 2016. C&B is led by CEO Jackson Zeng and has 64 team members across both Australia and the US. Caleb & Brown has not raised any outside capital. 

 

Architect Partners’ Observations

Architect Partners acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Caleb & Brown. 

 

Swyftx’s acquisition of Caleb & Brown marks the largest acquisition targeting high net worth crypto investors. It also reflects two important shifts in the evolution of crypto exchanges, particularly within the ANZ region.

 

First, high-net-worth client service is becoming a strategic differentiator. Exchanges are beginning to recognize that personalized brokerage and deep client relationships offer a competitive advantage while greatly reducing attrition. This is a model that high-net-worth clients are accustomed to in their financial lives. Caleb & Brown’s approach, which assigns a dedicated broker to every client, stands apart from the high-volume, low-touch models that dominate the market. Swyftx gains access not only to clients but also to an established business model that emphasizes trust, service, and retention in a way few crypto exchanges have pursued.

 

Second, this is a milestone moment for ANZ crypto M&A. While there have been many plays for global expansion by exchanges, this is the first of its kind in Australia moving into the US, signaling that the region is entering a more active phase of market maturity. 

 

We believe this transaction will serve as a catalyst for further strategic activity to expand globally and to augment services as companies seek differentiation in both product and customer segments.

 

Strategic Rationale

Swyftx is acquiring Caleb & Brown to expand into the United States via C&B’s regulatory framework, and to acquire the relationship model inherently required with a higher-tier customer base. This acquisition will grant Swyftx entry into the U.S. 12 to 24 months faster than otherwise possible organically. Furthermore, the acquisition diversifies Swyftx’s primarily retail client base to include 25k+ high net worth individuals in numerous countries. 

 

“Caleb & Brown has quietly established one of the most impressive brokerage offerings in the world, with a heavily differentiated private client service. We see enormous growth potential.” – Jason Titman

Insights

Week of June 09 – June 15

Todd White
June 18, 2025
DOWNLOAD FULL REPORT

June 09 – June 15 (Published June 18th)

PERSPECTIVES by Todd White

 

 

24 Crypto Private Financings Raised: $196.9M

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $333.8M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $273.8M

 

 

Members of the Architect Partners team will be in New York for Permissionless next week, as well as in London for other industry events. Please reach out to schedule a meeting.

 

 

As we go to press, the U.S. Senate just passed its version of the GENIUS Act stablecoin bill, marking the first time the Senate has cleared any piece of crypto legislation and representing a potentially significant move toward increased regulatory clarity in the U.S. Meanwhile, the CLARITY Act market infrastructure bill was introduced in the House of Representatives in late May, offering a framework for classifying and regulating crypto assets, with the goal of providing clear legal pathways for both institutional and retail adoption. The lack of regulatory clarity in the critical U.S. market is often cited as a principal impediment to broader user adoption of crypto technologies. Taken together, the bills could do much to address that concern.

 

 

Yet a clearer regulatory framework is not, alone, sufficient for mass crypto adoption. Several other barriers have impeded adoption, including scalability, high implementation and transaction fees, security and trust issues, and perhaps most importantly, the dizzying complexity and poor usability of on-chain tools and solutions. The good news is that each of these is related in some fashion to the infrastructure underlying use cases and protocols. While regulatory opacity has, until recently, been the result of political dysfunction and intransigence beyond our industry’s control, improving the infrastructure and poor user experience can be addressed with the right combination of smart minds and smart capital focusing on the right problems.

 

 

We’ve seen this play out in financing trends over the last several years, with infrastructure investments retaining persistent and durable favor throughout the chilly downturn and into the currently warmer season. By our numbers, total digital asset infrastructure investments have represented roughly one-third of all financings from 2021 to present, and only a slightly lower percentage of transaction values across the same period. This consistent support appetite is impressive, but it also makes sense. Clunky and confusing systems will never reach broad adoption, no matter how favorable the regulatory winds may be. The teams who hunkered down to build solutions that address the clunks and improve the experience, things that we could control, should now be poised for (hopefully) sensible regulatory frameworks that may be emerging. We see this trend emerging not just in financings, but also in the M&A space, with the acquisitions of Web3Auth and Privy occurring over the past couple of weeks.

 

 

But it will only matter if non-crypto-native people and institutions can migrate into the tech easily, and without getting spooked, spoofed, or scammed. One of the most important components for this migration is the usability of crypto wallets, the essential tools that enable users to interact with blockchain networks by generating the information needed to send, receive, and manage crypto assets, generally by managing the cryptographic keys needed for cryptocurrency transactions. Yet the technical complexity of key management and the vulnerabilities inherent in wallet storage solutions, especially those connected to the internet or lacking robust security protocols, can be daunting for the crypto cognoscenti, let alone the skeptics and uninitiated.

 

 

Turnkey, a company dedicated to verifiable key management infrastructure, raised $30M this week to help address this problem. The company develops embedded wallets that don’t rely on phishable seed phrases, potentially addressing both usability and security concerns. Their clients include prediction market platform Polymarket, NFT marketplace Magic Eden, and Web3 development platform Alchemy. Their Series B round was led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Galaxy Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Variant, and Wintermute Ventures. Impressive names across the board for a team that emerged in 2022 from Coinbase Custody to identify, and work to solve, the limitations of “old school” custodial infrastructure. They intend to deploy their new capital into more open-source tools, deeper integrations, and modular infrastructure for payments, AI agents, and decentralized finance. We hope companies like turnkey and others can reduce friction and enhance adoption with the regulatory tailwinds at their back.

 

 

Contact ryan@architectpartners.com to schedule a meeting