Japan's crypto market is consolidating around its biggest financial players, and SBI Holdings just made its largest move yet. The Tokyo-based group has agreed to acquire the cryptocurrency exchange Bitbank for 46.7 billion yen — about $289 million — taking full ownership of one of the country's established trading venues, The Block reported.
The deal
SBI will buy 100% of Bitbank through a wholly owned subsidiary, with the transaction structured in stages — purchasing shares from founders and individual holders, then buying out existing backers including Mixi and Ceres — and expected to close around October 2026, subject to clearance from Japan's Fair Trade Commission, according to crypto.news. SBI had disclosed it was in talks in May.
Combined with SBI's existing exchange, SBI VC Trade, the merged business would hold roughly 2.92 million crypto accounts and about ¥1.1 trillion ($6.8 billion) in customer crypto assets, based on April figures — making it the largest crypto operator in Japan by assets, SBI said.
What Bitbank is
Founded in 2014, Bitbank is a long-running Japanese retail crypto exchange operating under the Financial Services Agency's licensing regime, and it says it has never suffered a security breach — a meaningful claim in a country scarred by the 2014 Mt. Gox collapse and the 2018 Coincheck hack, in which roughly $530 million in tokens was stolen. That clean record, and an established customer base, are much of what SBI is buying.
SBI's crypto strategy
The purchase accelerates a years-long push. SBI already runs SBI VC Trade and has built deep ties to Ripple — it holds a stake in the company and operates the SBI Ripple Asia payments venture — and only a day before the Bitbank announcement, Ripple's dollar stablecoin RLUSD went live in Japan through SBI VC Trade. SBI said the deal lets it combine Bitbank's customers, technology and compliance with its own to expand trading and build new products tied to stablecoins and other digital assets.
A consolidating market
Japan is one of the few large economies with a comprehensive statutory regime for crypto exchanges, requiring registration, asset segregation and regular audits — rules tightened after the Coincheck theft. That compliance burden is fixed and favors large, well-capitalized operators, and the market has steadily consolidated around fewer, bigger platforms. Buying Bitbank rather than building from scratch hands SBI an instant jump in accounts, removes a competitor and imports an exchange with a clean operating history.
If the deal closes on schedule, SBI will enter the fourth quarter running Japan's biggest crypto book by assets, spanning retail trading, stablecoin infrastructure and a Ripple-linked cross-border payments network — a combination with few direct parallels among global financial groups, and a marker of how serious Japan's established finance houses have become about digital assets.
