The Nationwide Business Corporate Pension Fund — it covers about 1,200 small and medium-sized Japanese companies — is making a move that would’ve sounded crazy even two years ago. Starting this fiscal year, it’s allocating roughly 1% of its $130 million in assets to cryptocurrency.
The fund, based in Okayama, won’t be buying coins directly. It’s going through a passive fund run by an unnamed major hedge fund that holds a basket of crypto assets. Still, the signal is clear: a pension fund that serves actual workers at actual companies now considers Bitcoin and its peers a legitimate part of a diversified portfolio.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Japan’s House of Representatives passed a bill on June 11 that brings crypto under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act — the same regulatory umbrella that covers stocks and bonds. If it clears the House of Councillors, it opens the door to crypto ETFs in Japan and could slash the tax rate on crypto gains from a brutal 55% down to 20%.
Meanwhile, SBI Shinsei Bank is already testing a program that gives depositors vouchers redeemable for Bitcoin, Ether, or XRP. And Metaplanet — the most Bitcoin-heavy public company in Japan — just bought a securities firm for 2.1 billion yen so it can build Bitcoin yield products.
Japan’s approach is methodical, almost boring. No hype, no moon talk. Just regulators writing rules, banks building products, and pension funds quietly allocating. It might be exactly how mainstream adoption is supposed to look.
Originally reported by Cointelegraph. Rewritten and published by The Coolest Info.
