How SBI is Quietly Assembling a Cross-Border Cryptocurrency Empire

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summary

• SBI Ventures Asset acquired a majority stake in Coinhako on July 16.
• The deal is SBI’s fifth digital asset move in five weeks, alongside JPYSC, Bitbank, EDX Markets and SBI Solana Global.
• JPYSC remains limited to SBI VC Trade accounts without access to an external wallet.
• The Bitbank acquisition still requires approval from the Japan Fair Trade Commission.

SBI Ventures Asset Pte. Ltd. closed. Ltd. acquired a majority stake in Coinhako on July 16, transforming Southeast Asia’s longest-licensed cryptocurrency exchange into a Japanese financial conglomerate that already has more than 14 million users across its brokerage, banking and insurance arms. Viewed on its own, the deal looks like a routine acquisition in a year full of them. Considering everything SBI Holdings has announced since late June, and four more in five weeks, the Coinhako purchase is the final piece of the aisle that SBI has put together in plain sight over five weeks. SBI’s creation looks different from the Circle and Tether-focused infrastructure stories dominating Western cryptocurrency coverage this year: The Tokyo securities firm is trying to own every layer between the Japanese yen and a retail account in Southeast Asia.

SBI Ventures Asset bought out Coinhako shareholders without disclosing terms

The mechanics of the Coinhako deal were explained in SBI Holdings’ special notice to shareholders. SBI Ventures Asset Pte. Ltd has received approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore to inject capital into and purchase shares from existing investors in Holdbuild Pte. Ltd., the entity behind Coinhako. The acquisition closed on July 16 and made Coinhako a consolidated subsidiary; Neither company revealed the price. Coinhako itself operates through two regulated units, Hako Technology Pte. Ltd., which holds a Master Payment Institution license from MAS, and Alpha Hako Ltd., registered with the Financial Services Commission of the British Virgin Islands. Yushu Liu and Jerry Ng co-founded the exchange nearly a decade ago; Deal coverage consistently puts its user base in the hundreds of thousands.

SBI Holdings Chairman and CEO Yoshitaka Kitao framed the purchase as a step towards that A global corridor for digital assets by connecting exchanges around the worldlanguage that appears again almost verbatim in other SBI announcements in July, suggesting it’s a running thesis rather than a one-off soundbite. On Coinhako’s own blog, Liu described his joining the group as… The next natural chapter for Coinhakoa company he said has spent a decade building a compliant platform within one of the world’s most demanding regulatory environments.

Five weeks, five ads, one pass

What separates this from a normal M&A process is how tightly the pieces intertwine once they are placed side by side on a timeline. Each movement is placed in a different layer of the same stack: an exchange layer for joining users, an asset layer for tokenizing what they trade, a ledger layer for where those tokens actually live, and a settlement layer for how money moves underneath it all.

The Japanese stocks tokenized through Ondo Global Markets will move through SBI’s own channels, SBI Securities, SBI VC Trade, Bitbank and Coinhako, and settle at JPYSC on Solana Rails. Every link in that chain is owned, partly owned, or contractually linked to SBI, which is exactly what Ondo’s version of the plans means Linking Japan to the global symbolic economy.

JPYSC’s Type III designation removes the 1 million yen ceiling that limits its only domestic competitor

The flattening layer deserves more attention because it is the part of the stack that is difficult to replicate quickly. Launched on June 24, JPYSC is issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank and is distributed exclusively through SBI VC Trade, which was jointly developed with Singapore-based Startale Group. Japan’s revised Payment Services Law classifies it as a trust-type electronic payment instrument, a structure that, unlike the money transfer license backed by rival stablecoin JPYC, places no cap on holdings or transfers. JPYC, which has been in operation since October 2025, is bound by a limit of about 1 million yen on balances and transfers under its Type II registration; JPYSC’s credit bank structure avoids this ceiling entirely, and its reserves are allowed to hold up to half their value in Japanese government bonds rather than purely in cash.

The limitation, and it is real, is that JPYSC cannot currently leave the walls of SBI. A company spokesperson told CoinDesk that its use remains limited to accounts within SBI VC Trade and that it does not yet support withdrawals to external wallets or settlement via public blockchains. Each token stock trade enabled by the Ondo partnership will eventually, for the time being, reside within a closed loop rather than an open chain that a third-party wallet can touch.

Bitbank still needs the Fair Trade Commission’s signature before the accounts can stand

The exchange layer within Japan goes through Bitbank, and this deal has been signed but not finalized yet. SBI on June 25 agreed to acquire the exchange for approximately 46.7 billion yen, or about $289 million, through its subsidiary SBICAH GK, which will first buy shares directly from Bitbank CEO Noriyuki Hirosu and other individual owners, and then subscribe to a new share issue that Bitbank will use to buy out the companies’ largest shareholders, MIXI and Ceres.

Combined with SBI VC Trade, the combined entity will become the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Japan in terms of assets under custody, at least on paper.

None of this is final. The deal still requires approval from the Japan Fair Trade Commission, and is not expected to close until around October. Most coverage of this deal actually describes the combined entity as the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Japan. This description is only accurate after the JFTC clears it.

For anyone trying to trade this rather than just reading about it, the gap between advertising and reach is the whole story now. ONDO has already jumped into distribution news, but there are no live Japanese token shares yet to actually buy, and JPYSC’s closed-loop status means that none of the settlement layers can be accessed from outside of SBI’s own accounts. Taking a position ahead of the JFTC’s decision on Bitbank means betting on regulatory timing, not a live product.

No one in Asia is building all the layers at once

Joseph Goh, director and head of Asia Pacific at crypto investment bank Areta, told CoinDesk that SBI is the investment bank for cryptocurrencies. The first financial group in Asia to go after the entire digital asset value chainwhich includes issuance, settlement, trading infrastructure and retail distribution, and to do so at the regional level and not just at home. This is a meaningful distinction from the way most exchanges or stablecoin issuers have approached the market, choosing and defending a single layer. SBI frames spending as long-term infrastructure, not cycle chasing, a claim backed by its $76 million major investment in US-based EDX Markets and a stake in risk management firm Gauntlet, neither of which touches its domestic markets at all. Read together, these two bets appear to be a cross-region hedging rather than a bet on any one region.

The pass only works when JPYSC leaves SBI’s own servers

Each structural strength above comes with corresponding constraints. JPYSC’s closed loop means that the settlement barrier underneath this entire corridor cannot yet transfer value to anyone who is not already an SBI VC Trade client, limiting its utility for the cross-border and third-party liquidity that Ondo and Coinhako trades are theoretically supposed to unlock. Domestic competition also remains: Japan’s three major banking groups, MUFG, SMBC and Mizuho, ​​are jointly developing their own stablecoins and targeting direct commercial transactions during FY2026. Digging deeper, concentration risk becomes a regulatory rather than an SBI topic. The Bank for International Settlements used its 2026 annual report to argue that privately issued stablecoins broadly lack the institutional guarantees to function as systemic money, a warning aimed at the stablecoin model in general but applying with particular force to a structure where one group controls the exchange, tokenization venue, ledger, and settlement assets simultaneously. Whether this focus is seen as a smart corporate strategy or a regulatory red flag depends entirely on whether JPYSC actually leaves SBI subsidiaries.

What actually closes the loop between now and October

There are three things that will tell you whether this will become the “sovereign corridor” that SBI describes or will remain a series of loosely linked acquisitions. The first is the Fair Trade Commission’s decision on Bitbank, expected around October, without which the “largest exchange in Japan” claim remains unverifiable. The second is whether JPYSC would gain any bridge to public blockchains or external wallets, which is the only change that would transform it from an internal ledger entry to the actual settlement infrastructure that other institutions can connect to. The third question is more mundane but equally important: whether Ondo Global Markets has already issued the first Japanese token shares under this partnership. A distribution agreement and a live tradable token are not the same thing. July issued four press releases describing the intent, not a single product that a retail investor can currently purchase.