Prime Minister’s podium, SBI “buying in bulk”: Japan is racing to capture the compliance upside in crypto

On July 13, WebX 2026, which opened in Tokyo, drew about 15k attendees. Japan’s current prime minister appeared on stage to deliver a speech in person, reaffirming that the “Startup Total Support Package” will be expanded to provide greater funding support. Before that, both former prime ministers Fumio Kishida and Shigeru Ishiba had also delivered remarks in succession at the previous two WebX events—Kishida in 2024 emphasized that tax and regulatory reforms would pave the way for Web3 startups, while Ishiba in 2025 went one step further by positioning Web3 as the core of a “once-in-a-century” industrial revolution.

Prime ministers have changed one term after another, but the act of “showing up on the dais” has never changed. Japan’s bet on Web3 is not an individual decision by a politician—it is a long-term agenda written into the system.

Also on July 13, Japan’s financial conglomerate SBI threw down an even bigger card: a joint announcement with the Solana Foundation. The two parties reached a strategic cooperation agreement to jointly build Japan’s on-chain financial market. SBI R3 Japan will team up with the Solana Foundation, as well as existing shareholders SBI and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group. The company plans to rename itself as “SBI Solana Global”.

Pushing the timeline further back, SBI Holdings’ books show several eye-catching figures: an exclusive investment of $125 million in Gauntlet, an investment of $76 million in EDX Markets, and an acquisition of Bitbank for about $289 million. By the math, over a short cycle, SBI has poured nearly $500 million in real money into the crypto track.

A more down-to-earth moment happened in Tokyo’s Konan/Komagome-Kouren district: in early August, the convenience store chain Lawson plans to pilot POS payments with the JPYC stablecoin at that store. Buy a bottle of water, buy an onigiri meal, and check out with a stablecoin—this is Japan’s first time to put stablecoin payments into a real-world retail scenario.

On the surface, these things seem unrelated, but when you string them together, they add up to a signal: Japan is using national will to build a compliant “high-speed highway” for the crypto industry.

First layer: a full set of licenses, capital, and scenarios

Start with the license-level moves. This round of investment by SBI is not scattershot funding—every single dollar lands precisely on key nodes of infrastructure.

Gauntlet is a core player in DeFi risk management and on-chain market making. Investing in it is tantamount to buying “the power of voice” in risk control. EDX Markets has Citadel and Fidelity among the behind-the-scenes lineup of Wall Street giants, standing as an institutional-grade crypto trading settlement channel. Bitbank is also one of Japan’s largest domestic crypto exchanges—taking directly is the traffic gateway.

And what SBI Solana Global adds is the most critical missing piece of the puzzle: the base-layer public chain. Under the cooperation agreement, the new company will move forward with five businesses around the Solana network—issuing and distributing the yen stablecoin JPYSC; composing and distributing corporate bonds and tokenized RWAs; cross-border payment infrastructure; on-chain financial services for institutional investors; and next-generation payment infrastructure for the AI Agent era.

Risk control, settlement, the gateway, the public chain—four links taken all at once. This isn’t a financial investment; it’s industrial-chain positioning.

Next, look at JPYSC, the yen stablecoin SBI itself launched, paired with a lending service offering a 3% annualized yield. In an environment of long-term near-zero or even negative yen interest rates, the impact is self-evident. The cash that Japanese savers have been sitting on—once even a portion is pulled by this yield, it becomes a tangible flow of funds.

And Lawson’s POS pilot turns stablecoins from “a string of numbers in an exchange” into “money you can swipe at the convenience store cashier.” This step is even more critical than all the capital maneuvers before it, because it touches the entry power of the payment scenario—whoever first lays stablecoins into the offline retail network will first win the minds of ordinary people.

Finally, there is the tax system. Japan’s parliament plans that by 2028, it will cut crypto capital gains tax from 55% to 20%. The meaning is straightforward: under a 55% tax rate, both retail investors and institutions tend to keep assets abroad or simply not move them. Dropping to 20%, essentially aligning with stocks and futures, means that for the first time, domestic Japanese capital has the incentive to “lock in gains within the country.”

Second layer: the higher the barrier, the more the insiders eat

On the surface, this looks like Japan’s government supporting startups, SBI carrying out industrial investments, and Lawson chasing the trend. But the real question worth pondering is: when a country’s regulatory barriers have never been low, who will laugh last?

The answer is clear: the one who can run all the approval processes first.

Japan’s crypto regulation has long been known for being strict: high license thresholds and long approval timelines. Most small and mid-sized institutions can’t even prepare the application materials. Yet precisely this high wall keeps most potential competitors out, leaving an almost “cleared” battlefield for a handful of giants. SBI spent years assembling, in one go, exchanges, settlement channels, and risk-control systems. Then it intercepted yen liquidity through stablecoin business. By the time a retail network like Lawson expands the payment scenario, SBI can almost simultaneously capture both licensing advantages and traffic advantages, forming a compliance closed loop that others can’t match in the short term.

A comparison makes it even clearer: in the United States, the stablecoin track is a battle involving professional issuers like Circle and traditional financial institutions. Japan, however, follows the route of “finance conglomerates from the zaibatsu system personally stepping onto the field.” Major incumbents like Mitsubishi UFJ and SBI are not investing in crypto companies; instead, they embed crypto business into their existing financial systems. That means Japan’s crypto infrastructure, from day one, carries the bloodline and regulatory backing of traditional finance. For small and mid-sized institutions, trying to take a share is far harder than in the U.S. or Singapore.

The tax-rate cut is the same logic. On the surface, it looks like a benefit to ordinary investors, but the 20% rate truly unlocks Japan’s vast pools of domestic savings. Once some portion flows into crypto assets, it’s the local players who have already secured their license positions and control the gateways who receive the liquidity dividend first. Regulatory loosening is not “handing out money”—it’s enabling those who are already standing inside the door to catch the new money pouring in from outside first.

Third layer: a replicable template

Zoom back to the industry itself. This package of moves by Japan offers an observable institutional template: how a country can pull the crypto industry from the gray zone into the mainstream narrative within a few months by combining “high-barrier licensing + conglomerate-level capital + retail scenario pilots + tax incentives.”

This has direct reference value for other jurisdictions. In recent years, the gray areas for stablecoins and crypto business have been propped up to a large extent by regulatory vacuum. Japan, Hong Kong, and the UAE are now densely filling in licenses and tax systems. That shows that the arbitrage space of “where regulation is loose, run there” is being systematically squeezed. The industry’s survival logic is shifting from “hit-and-run” to “go after licenses.”

Japan’s path is steady, but also slow. SBI took several years to piece together this full licensing matrix, and Lawson’s pilot is only “a single store in Kouren Gate City.” But the direction is already unmistakable: when a conservative, old-guard financial country begins laying groundwork personally, it signals that this route has already been determined to lead to real money.

This article is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. The market is risky; invest with caution.

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