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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 16 – June 22

Todd White
June 25, 2025
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June 16 – June 22 (Published June 25th)

PERSPECTIVES by Todd White

 

29 Crypto Private Financings Raised: $199.1M

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $257.6M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $256.3M

 

Staking has become an intuitive concept to those steeped in the world of crypto and decentralized finance, but it can be elusive and confusing for those outside or newly interested in the sector. The most common analogy is to interest earned on bank deposits, where banks pay account holders a return in exchange for the right to lend or otherwise rehypothecate their funds to third parties. This is both fundamental to how banks operate and central to concerns about the stability of the “fractional reserving” system, which allows the same funds to be re-lent and re-deposited almost infinitely.

 

Staking permits crypto holders to receive a yield on their assets, but through a fundamentally different mechanism that was originally designed to avoid the systemic risks of fractional reserving. Transactions on a blockchain must be validated in order to be executed and recorded on the chain. This can be done through “proof-of-work,” where bitcoin miners compute complex calculations to compete for rewards, or “proof-of-stake,” where users of blockchains like Ethereum lock up (or “stake”) their cryptocurrency to help verify transactions and secure the network. In return, they earn rewards that are similar to interest in a savings account. The more you stake, the greater your chance of being chosen to validate transactions and receive rewards.

 

But traditional staking ties up the assets, making them illiquid and inaccessible for other uses while they’re staked. To solve the problem, liquid staking was developed, where users receive a “liquid staking token” (LST) in return for their staked assets. This LST represents an interest in staked assets and can be traded, used in DeFi, or lent out, providing liquidity or potentially additional yields while the original tokens remain locked up. This has led to the next step, known as “restaking,” which allows users to take their LSTs and “restake” them to secure not just the main blockchain (like Ethereum) but also additional networks or applications, which are known as Actively Validated Services (AVS). Examples of AVS include rollups, oracles, data-availability layers, and other decentralized protocols that need security but don’t want to build their own validator networks.

 

If this sounds confusing, that’s because it is complicated. But it is probably no more so than the world of repackaged security interests known as ABS, MBS, and CDSs that nearly took down the financial system in 2008 and begat the whole crypto world in the first place. Whether the advent of LSTs and liquid restaking is re-introducing systemic risk can be actively debated. Suffice it to say the space is receiving significant interest among users and investors alike. Major players now include EigenLayer, Lido, Ether.Fi, Renzo, and StakeStone, among others.

 

EigenLayer, one of the concept’s pioneers, received a meaningful $70 million token investment from a16z, one of its early and consistent supporters. EigenLayer is a blockchain infrastructure protocol built on Ethereum that helped pioneer the concept of restaking. EigenLayer now acts as a marketplace connecting restakers and will use the new funds to launch EigenCloud, a new platform offering “verifiability-as-a-service” that lets developers build off-chain applications that are cryptographically verifiable, thus extending blockchain-grade trust to any computation or data workflow.

 

This certainly sounds intriguing, but let us hope that the evolving complexity does not also bring unmanageably complex risks.

 

Contact ryan@architectpartners.com to schedule a meeting.