SBI Holdings is going all-in on crypto. The Japanese financial giant signed deals to acquire full control of Bitbank through a 46.7 billion yen ($289 million) transaction, creating what it says will be the country’s biggest crypto exchange by assets under custody.
The structure is straightforward: SBI’s subsidiary SBICAH will buy shares from Bitbank CEO Noriyuki Hirosue and other shareholders, then subscribe to a third-party share allotment. Bitbank will buy back shares held by MIXI and Ceres, leaving SBI with 100% indirect ownership. The deal should close around October, pending regulatory approval.
Combined with SBI VC Trade, the merged entity would hold about 1.1 trillion yen in assets under custody and roughly 2.92 million crypto accounts. That puts it first among Japanese exchanges by custody assets and among the largest by user count.
Bitbank’s daily volume has sat below $50 million for most of the past four months, with BTC/JPY dominating at 39.5% of trades. Not massive by global standards, but the real play here isn’t volume — it’s distribution.
Beyond trading
The Bitbank acquisition is one piece of a much bigger puzzle. SBI has been building infrastructure across crypto trading, stablecoins, and tokenized assets at a pace that’s hard to ignore.
Just this week, SBI and Startale launched JPYSC, a yen-pegged stablecoin issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank. It’s limited to transfers within SBI VC Trade accounts for now, with public blockchain circulation coming once legal and tax issues get resolved. The same day, Ripple and SBI rolled out the dollar-backed RLUSD stablecoin in Japan.
Back in February, SBI and Startale unveiled Strium, a layer-1 blockchain for around-the-clock trading of tokenized equities and real-world assets. The Bitbank deal gives SBI another distribution channel for all of these products — and a much larger user base to push them through.
