Ripple RLUSD Backer SBI to Buy Bitbank for $289 Million

Crypto News

Japan's SBI Holdings has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Tokyo-based crypto exchange Bitbank for roughly 46.7 billion yen, or about $289 million, a move that would make the combined group Japan's largest cryptocurrency exchange by assets under custody. The official company release states the purchase will run through a wholly owned subsidiary, with Bitbank becoming an indirect, fully owned unit once SBI secures 100% of its voting rights. The transaction still requires clearance from Japan's Fair Trade Commission and other closing conditions, and the firms expect completion around October 2026. SBI flagged the financial impact on its current fiscal year as minor.

SBI's board approved the deal on Thursday, anchored by a series of agreements with Bitbank chief executive Noriyuki Hirosue, other individual shareholders, and the exchange's two largest corporate backers, MIXI Inc. and Ceres Inc., which together control nearly half of Bitbank. Under the structure detailed in the official filing, an SBI subsidiary first buys shares directly from Hirosue and individual holders, then subscribes to a fresh share issuance by Bitbank. Bitbank would use those proceeds to repurchase and retire the stakes held by MIXI and Ceres. The two-stage process is slated to run across August and October of this year.

Together, SBI VC Trade and Bitbank would oversee an estimated 1.1 trillion yen, around $6.8 billion, in customer assets under custody and serve roughly 2.92 million crypto accounts. The company's investor-relations disclosure frames that combined footprint as the largest among domestic Japanese venues by assets under custody and among the leaders by account count. For context, rivals such as bitFlyer, Coincheck and GMO each manage balances in the hundreds of billions of yen, so the integration opens a full order-of-magnitude gap. SBI cited end-of-April 2026 figures as the basis for the simple combined calculation.

Founded in May 2014, Bitbank ranks as one of Japan's leading venues and is widely regarded as the country's third largest by domestic users, with deeper altcoin coverage that complements SBI VC Trade's retail-brokerage base. The acquisition marks SBI's fourth consolidation step, following its long-running BITPOINT relationship and SBI VC Trade's absorption of Bitpoint Japan in April 2026. The financial disclosures included in SBI's announcement show Bitbank booked a net loss for the fiscal year ended December 2025, after two consecutive profitable years. SBI first revealed merger talks with Bitbank in May, making Thursday's announcement the culmination of roughly five months of negotiation.

The Bitbank purchase slots into a broader build-out at SBI. On June 23, the group launched JPYSC, a trust-bank-issued yen stablecoin developed with partner Startale, while SBI VC Trade became the first distribution agent in Japan for Ripple's RLUSD dollar stablecoin. That gives SBI active positions across three layers of on-chain finance at once: yen stablecoin issuance through its Shinsei trust-bank arm, dollar stablecoin distribution through SBI VC Trade, and exchange connectivity through the merged VC Trade and Bitbank platform — a stack comparable in ambition to leading DeFi rails. No other Japanese operator currently holds a meaningful stake across all three of these settlement tracks.

Japan's regulatory backdrop helps explain the timing. The Financial Services Agency has recently recognized certain foreign stablecoins as legal electronic payment instruments, approved trust-bank-type yen stablecoins, and cleared cross-border corporate settlement services, raising the premium on domestic groups that pair scale with a full license stack to court institutional clients. The acquisition itself still hinges on a green light from the Fair Trade Commission on competition grounds. SBI described the expected impact on its consolidated results for the fiscal year ending March 2027 as minor, signaling the deal is a strategic move for market position rather than a near-term earnings driver.

Read together, these threads point to one arc: Japan's crypto sector is consolidating into a handful of license-heavy giants, and SBI is engineering itself into the country's settlement and distribution spine across exchange, yen-stablecoin and dollar-stablecoin rails. Our reading is that the structure matters more than the price tag, since a roughly $289 million outlay buys a $6.8 billion custody base and a 2.92 million-account moat. The macro tape, by contrast, stays defensive: COINOTAG's aggregate data shows the Fear & Greed Index at 12 (Extreme Fear), Bitcoin dominance at 70.2%, and total crypto market capitalization near $1.72 trillion — sentiment far from any all-time-high euphoria, even as infrastructure deals press ahead.