In 2004 Betfair signed a joint venture agreement with Australia's Publishing and Broadcasting Limited to start the Australian exchange.
Betfair was awarded a non-exclusive licence by the Tasmanian Gaming Commission in February 2006 to conduct Australia's first betting exchange.
[1] In a unanimous verdict by the High Court of Australia on 27 March 2008, the two provisions of the legislation, purporting to ban Western Australians from using a betting exchange and prohibiting an unauthorised business from using Western Australian race lists, were declared invalid as they applied to Betfair.
The provisions were characterised as imposing a burden on interstate trade that was protectionist in nature, and therefore contravened section 92 of the Commonwealth Constitution.
In 2008 it was calculated that Betfair handle more transactions than all of Europe's stock exchanges combined – an average of 5 million a day, 99.9% are successfully completed in under one second.