On July 13, WebX 2026, which opened in Tokyo, attracted approximately 15,000 attendees. The current Prime Minister of Japan personally delivered a video message, reiterating the need to expand financial support through the "Startup Comprehensive Support Package." Prior to this, both former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba had delivered addresses at the previous two WebX conferences—Kishida in 2024 emphasized tax and regulatory reforms to pave the way for Web3 startups, and Ishiba in 2025 went further, positioning Web3 as the core of a "once-in-a-century" industrial revolution.
Prime ministers have changed, but the act of high-level backing has not. Japan's bet on Web3 is not a personal choice of any single politician; it's a long-term agenda written into the system.
Also on July 13, Japanese financial giant SBI played an even bigger card: a joint announcement with the Solana Foundation revealed a strategic partnership to jointly build Japan's on-chain financial market. SBI R3 Japan, in collaboration with the Solana Foundation and existing shareholders SBI and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, plans to rename the company "SBI Solana Global."
Rewinding further, SBI Holdings' ledger has seen several notable entries: an exclusive investment of $125 million in Gauntlet, a $76 million investment in EDX Markets, and the acquisition of Bitbank for approximately $289 million. In total, within a short cycle, SBI has deployed nearly $500 million in real capital into the crypto space.
A more down-to-earth scene unfolded at the Takanawa Gateway City Lawson store in Tokyo: in early August, Lawson planned to pilot POS payments using the JPYC stablecoin at this location. Buying a bottle of water or a rice ball and paying with stablecoins—this marks Japan's first time integrating stablecoin payments into a real-world retail scenario.
On the surface, these events seem unrelated. But strung together, they signal one thing: Japan is using its national will to open a compliant expressway for the crypto industry.
Level One: All-in Betting on Licensing, Capital, and Use Cases
First, look at the moves at the licensing level. SBI's current round of investments is not a scattered shotgun approach; each one precisely targets a key node in the infrastructure.
Gauntlet is a core player in DeFi risk management and on-chain market making. Investing in it is akin to securing a voice in the "risk management brain." EDX Markets, backed by Wall Street giants like Citadel and Fidelity, is the clearing channel for institutional-grade crypto trading. Bitbank is one of Japan's largest domestic crypto exchanges, giving direct access to a major traffic gateway.
The SBI Solana Global move fills in the most critical piece of the puzzle: the underlying public blockchain. According to the cooperation agreement, the new company will advance five major business areas around the Solana network—the issuance and circulation of the yen stablecoin JPYSC, the structuring and circulation of corporate bonds and tokenized RWAs, cross-border payment infrastructure, on-chain financial services for institutional investors, and next-generation payment infrastructure for the era of AI Agents.
Risk management, clearing, gateway, public chain—four key links secured in one go. This is not mere financial investment; this is strategic positioning across the industry chain.
Then consider the yen stablecoin JPYSC launched by SBI itself, paired with a 3% annualized lending service—in an environment of long-term zero or even negative interest rates for the yen, the disruptive power of this rate is self-evident. If even a portion of the cash held by Japanese savers is attracted by this rate, it would represent a tangible migration of capital.
Lawson's POS pilot, meanwhile, transforms stablecoins from "strings of numbers in an exchange" into "money that can be swiped at a convenience store checkout." This step is more crucial than all the preceding capital maneuvers because it touches the entry point to payment use cases—whoever first deploys stablecoins into offline retail networks first captures the mindset of ordinary people.
Finally, there's taxation. The Japanese parliament plans to reduce the crypto capital gains tax from 55% to 20% by 2028. The significance of this number is direct: under a 55% tax rate, both retail and institutional investors tend to keep assets offshore or simply not trade; lowering it to 20%, roughly on par with stocks and futures, means Japanese domestic capital has, for the first time, a real incentive to "realize gains" within the country.
Level Two: The Higher the Bar, the More Those Who Enter First Feast
On the surface, this looks like the Japanese government supporting startups, SBI making industrial investments, and Lawson following a trend. But the truly intriguing question is: when a country's regulatory bar has never been low, who gets to laugh last?
The answer is clear: the one who first navigates the entire approval process.
Japan's crypto regulation has always been notoriously strict, with high licensing barriers and long approval cycles that leave many small and medium-sized institutions unable to even prepare the application materials. But precisely this high barrier keeps most potential competitors out, leaving a nearly cleared battlefield for a handful of giants. SBI spent several years acquiring exchanges, clearing channels, and risk management systems in one go, then aims to capture yen liquidity through its stablecoin business. Once retail networks like Lawson roll out payment scenarios, SBI can almost simultaneously secure both licensing advantages and traffic advantages, forming a compliance loop that others cannot catch up with in the short term.
A comparison makes it clearer: The U.S. stablecoin sector is a mixed battle between specialized issuers like Circle and traditional financial institutions. Japan, however, is taking the route of "financial conglomerates personally entering the arena." Established financial institutions like Mitsubishi UFJ and SBI are not just investing in crypto companies; they are embedding crypto operations within their existing financial systems. This means Japan's crypto infrastructure, from day one, carries the lineage and regulatory backing of traditional finance, making it much harder for smaller players to get a piece of the pie compared to the U.S. or Singapore.
The same logic applies to the tax rate reduction. On the surface, it benefits ordinary investors, but the 20% rate truly aims to leverage Japan's massive pool of domestic savings. Once a portion of this capital flows into crypto assets, the first to enjoy the liquidity dividend will still be those domestic players who have already secured their licenses and control the entry points. Regulatory easing isn't about handouts; it's about allowing those already inside the door to be the first to catch the new funds pouring in from outside.
Level Three: A Replicable Template
Zooming back to the industry itself, Japan's combination punch provides an observable institutional template: how a country can use the four-piece set of "high-barrier licensing + conglomerate-level capital + retail pilot scenarios + tax concessions" to pull the crypto industry from a grey area into the mainstream narrative within a few months.
This has direct reference value for other jurisdictions. Over the past few years, grey areas for stablecoins and crypto operations have largely relied on regulatory vacuums. Regions like Japan, Hong Kong, and the UAE are now rapidly filling in licensing and tax frameworks, indicating that the arbitrage space of "running to wherever regulation is lax" is systematically narrowing. The industry's survival logic is shifting from "guerrilla tactics" to "license grabbing."
Japan's path is steady but slow. It took SBI years to assemble this full-license matrix, and Lawson's pilot is just for "one store at Takanawa Gateway City." But the direction is clear: when a traditionally conservative financial powerhouse starts paving the road itself, it signals that the road definitely leads to real money.
*The content of this article is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. Markets are risky; invest with caution.
