New forex rules come into force in Australia

In 2020, due to the COVID19 pandemic, online trading (and gambling, for that matter) increased immensely. To be more precise, in the second half of the past year, in Australia alone there were 3.4 times more accounts opened at Forex and CFD brokers compared to the same period in 2019. That prompted the Australian regulator ASIC (the Australian Securities and Investments Commission) to introduce new regulatory rules for the local brokers.
Those rules are, essentially, the same as the ones ESMA introduced in the European Union back in 2018. Maximum leverage is being capped at 1:30 for major Forex pairs, 1:20 for exotic and minor pairs, gold and major indices, 1:10 for commodities and minor indices, 1:5 for stocks and finally, 1:2 for crypto assets. ASIC also introduced negative balance protection and banned trading bonuses which encouraged customers to trade excessively.

ASIC claims the reason for this move is the pandemic, but I, personally, I think they would have introduced such regulation with or without the pandemi