How SBI Is Quietly Assembling a Cross-Border Crypto Empire

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Summary

• SBI Ventures Asset acquired majority control of Coinhako on July 16.
• The deal is the fifth SBI digital-asset move in five weeks, alongside JPYSC, Bitbank, EDX Markets, and SBI Solana Global.
• JPYSC remains restricted to SBI VC Trade accounts with no external wallet access.
• The Bitbank acquisition still requires Japan’s Fair Trade Commission approval.

SBI Ventures Asset Pte. Ltd. closed on a majority stake in Coinhako on July 16, folding Southeast Asia’s longest-running licensed crypto exchange into a Japanese financial conglomerate that already counts more than 14 million users across its brokerage, banking, and insurance arms. Taken on its own, the deal looks like a routine acquisition in a year full of them. Taken alongside everything SBI Holdings has announced since late June, four other announcements in five weeks, the Coinhako purchase reads as the final piece of a corridor SBI has been assembling in full public view over five weeks. SBI’s buildout looks different from the Circle- and Tether-centered infrastructure stories dominating Western crypto coverage this year: a Tokyo securities house trying to own every layer between a Japanese yen and a Southeast Asian retail account.

SBI Ventures Asset bought out Coinhako’s shareholders without disclosing terms

The mechanics of the Coinhako deal are laid out in SBI Holdings’ own notice to shareholders. SBI Ventures Asset Pte. Ltd. obtained approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore for a capital injection into, and a purchase of 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 disclosed the price. Coinhako itself operates through two regulated units, Hako Technology Pte. Ltd., which holds a Major Payment Institution license from the MAS, and Alpha Hako Ltd., registered with the British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission. Yusho Liu and Gerry Eng co-founded the exchange roughly a decade ago; coverage of the deal consistently puts its user base in the hundreds of thousands.

SBI Holdings chairman and CEO Yoshitaka Kitao framed the purchase as a step toward a global corridor for digital assets by connecting exchanges worldwide, language that shows up again almost verbatim in SBI’s other July announcements, suggesting it is the operating thesis rather than a one-off soundbite. On Coinhako’s own blog, Liu described joining the group as the natural next chapter for Coinhako, a company he said had spent ten years building a compliant platform inside one of the world’s more demanding regulatory environments.

Five weeks, five announcements, one corridor

What separates this from an ordinary run of M&A is how tightly the pieces interlock once laid side by side on a timeline. Each move slots into a different layer of the same stack: an exchange layer for onboarding 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 all of it.

A Japanese stock tokenized through Ondo Global Markets would move across SBI’s own channels, SBI Securities, SBI VC Trade, Bitbank, Coinhako, and settle in JPYSC on Solana rails. Every link in that chain is owned, part-owned, or contractually bound to SBI, exactly what Ondo’s own release meant by plans to connect Japan with the global tokenized economy.

JPYSC’s Type III classification removes the ¥1 million ceiling that limits its only domestic rival

The settlement layer deserves closer attention because it is the part of the stack that is hardest to replicate quickly. JPYSC launched on June 24, issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank and distributed exclusively through SBI VC Trade, developed jointly with Singapore-based Startale Group. Japan’s amended Payment Services Act classifies it as a trust-type Electronic Payment Instrument, a structure that, unlike the funds-transfer license underpinning the rival JPYC stablecoin, carries no cap on holdings or remittances. JPYC, live since October 2025, is bound by a roughly one million yen limit on balances and transfers under its Type II registration; JPYSC’s trust-bank structure sidesteps that ceiling entirely, and its reserves are permitted to hold up to half their value in Japanese Government Bonds rather than sitting purely in cash.

The limitation, and it is a real one, is that JPYSC currently cannot leave SBI’s own walls. A company spokesperson told CoinDesk that its use remains confined to accounts within SBI VC Trade and that it does not yet support withdrawals to external wallets or settlement across public blockchains. Every tokenized-equity trade the Ondo partnership eventually enables will, for now, settle inside a closed loop rather than on an open chain a third-party wallet could touch.

Bitbank still needs the Fair Trade Commission’s signature before the math holds up

The exchange layer inside Japan runs through Bitbank, and that deal is signed but not finished. SBI agreed on June 25 to acquire the exchange for roughly ¥46.7 billion, about $289 million, structured through its subsidiary SBICAH GK, which will first buy shares directly from Bitbank CEO Noriyuki Hirosue and other individual holders, then subscribe to a new share issuance that Bitbank will use to buy out its two largest corporate shareholders, MIXI and Ceres.

Combined with SBI VC Trade, the merged entity would become Japan’s largest crypto exchange by assets under custody, at least on paper.

None of that is final. The transaction still requires clearance from Japan’s Fair Trade Commission and is not expected to close until around October. Most coverage of this deal already describes the combined entity as Japan’s largest crypto exchange. That description only becomes accurate once the JFTC clears it.

For anyone trying to trade this rather than just read about it, the gap between announcement and access is the whole story right now. ONDO has already moved on the distribution news, but there is no tokenized Japanese equity live yet to actually buy, and JPYSC’s closed-loop status means none of the settlement layer is reachable from outside SBI’s own accounts. Positioning ahead of the JFTC decision on Bitbank means betting on regulatory timing, not a live product.

Nobody else in Asia is building every layer at once

Joseph Goh, director and head of Asia Pacific at crypto investment bank Areta, told CoinDesk that SBI is the first financial group in Asia to go after the entire digital asset value chain, spanning issuance, settlement, trading infrastructure, and retail distribution, and doing it regionally rather than only at home. That is a meaningful distinction from how most exchanges or stablecoin issuers have approached the market, picking one layer and defending it. SBI frames the spending as long-term infrastructure, not cycle-chasing, a claim backed by its $76 million lead investment in US-based EDX Markets and a stake in risk manager Gauntlet, neither of which touches its home markets at all. Read together, those two bets look like a hedge across regions rather than a bet on any single one.

The corridor only works once JPYSC leaves SBI’s own servers

Every structural strength above comes with a corresponding constraint. JPYSC’s closed loop means the settlement rail underneath this entire corridor cannot yet move value to anyone who isn’t already an SBI VC Trade customer, which caps its usefulness for the cross-border, third-party liquidity that the Ondo and Coinhako deals are theoretically supposed to unlock. Domestic competition is not standing still either: Japan’s three largest banking groups, MUFG, SMBC, and Mizuho, are jointly developing their own stablecoin and have targeted live commercial transactions within fiscal 2026.  Zoom out further and the concentration risk becomes a regulatory theme rather than an SBI-specific one. The Bank for International Settlements used its 2026 annual report to argue that privately issued stablecoins broadly lack the institutional safeguards to function as systemic money, a warning aimed at the stablecoin model in general but one that applies with particular force to a structure where a single conglomerate controls the exchange, the tokenization venue, the ledger, and the settlement asset all at once. Whether that concentration reads as smart corporate strategy or a regulatory red flag depends entirely on whether JPYSC ever actually leaves SBI’s own subsidiaries.

What actually closes the loop between now and October

Three things will tell you whether this becomes the “sovereign corridor” SBI is describing or stays a loosely connected string of acquisitions. The first is the Fair Trade Commission’s decision on Bitbank, expected around October, without which the “largest exchange in Japan” claim remains unverified. The second is whether JPYSC gains any bridge to public blockchains or external wallets, the single change that would convert it from an internal ledger entry into actual settlement infrastructure other institutions could plug into. The third is more mundane but just as telling: whether Ondo Global Markets actually issues a first tokenized Japanese equity under this partnership. A distribution agreement and a live, tradable token are not the same thing. July has produced four press releases describing intent, not one product a retail investor can currently buy.