XRP-Linked SBI to Buy Bitbank for $289M, Japan's Largest Crypto Exchange

Crypto News

SBI Holdings, Japan's financial conglomerate, has agreed to acquire Tokyo-based crypto exchange Bitbank for roughly 46.7 billion yen, or nearly 289 million dollars, in a deal that would make it Japan's largest crypto exchange by assets under custody. The company's official announcement, dated Thursday, confirms the purchase runs through wholly owned subsidiary SBICAH LLC, leaving SBI with full voting control once conditions are met. Founded in 2014, Bitbank ranks among Japan's largest domestic venues. The transaction still requires clearance from Japan's Fair Trade Commission and is expected to close around October, marking the formal conclusion of merger talks first disclosed in May.

The acquisition follows a two-stage structure detailed in the official filing. An SBI subsidiary will first buy shares directly from Bitbank chief executive Noriyuki Hirosue and other individual holders, then subscribe to a new share issuance. Bitbank will use those proceeds to buy back and retire the stakes held by its two largest corporate shareholders, MIXI Inc. and Ceres Inc., which together control nearly half of the exchange. SBI's board approved the agreements on Thursday. The company described the expected impact on its consolidated results for the fiscal year ending March 2027 as minor, signaling a strategic rather than near-term earnings move.

Combined with SBI VC Trade, the group's existing crypto arm, the merged operation would hold an estimated 1.1 trillion yen, or roughly 6.8 billion dollars, in customer assets under custody and serve about 2.92 million crypto accounts. On those figures, SBI says the group would rank first among Japanese exchanges by assets under custody and among the largest by user accounts. For context, domestic rivals such as bitFlyer, Coincheck and GMO each manage assets in the hundreds of billions of yen, meaning the merger opens a full order-of-magnitude gap. Bitbank's broader altcoin coverage complements SBI VC Trade's retail base.

The Bitbank purchase is the fourth step in SBI's roll-up of Japan's exchange market. The group already operates the proprietary SBI VC Trade platform alongside its long-running BITPOINT relationship, and in April 2026 SBI VC Trade completed the absorption of Bitpoint Japan. Bitbank, long the country's third-largest domestic venue, carries a user base with low overlap and a wider product line, including deeper listings of altcoins such as Algorand. The combination hands SBI a complete stack: a compliant retail brokerage channel, a crypto-native user pool, and the stablecoin issuance capability of its Shinsei Trust banking unit.

The timing aligns with SBI's wider stablecoin push. On June 23, the group launched JPYSC, a trust-bank-model yen stablecoin developed with partner Startale. Unlike algorithmic stablecoins that defend their peg through code-enforced supply mechanics, JPYSC is backed through a licensed trust-bank structure, reflecting Japan's regulatory preference for fully collateralized issuance. Japan's Financial Services Agency has moved quickly this year, recognizing foreign stablecoins as legal electronic payment instruments and clearing trust-bank yen issuance. That regulatory clarity makes a license-complete, scale-heavy domestic group an increasingly attractive counterparty for institutional clients.

SBI's strategy now spans three tracks at once. SBI VC Trade has become the first distributor in Japan for Ripple's RLUSD dollar stablecoin, giving the group a dollar-pegged channel to sit alongside its yen issuance and merged exchange network. The financial disclosures included in the announcement also show Bitbank reported a net loss for the fiscal year ended December 2025, ending two consecutive profitable years. That softer standalone performance underscores why scale and a full licensing stack — rather than a single venue's trading margins — sit at the center of SBI's consolidation thesis as it builds out trading, stablecoins and on-chain finance.

Read together, these moves frame a single arc: Japan is engineering national champions in digital assets just as macro sentiment turns defensive. Our aggregate market data shows the Fear and Greed Index at 13 of 100, deep in Extreme Fear, with Bitcoin dominance at 70.2 percent and total crypto market capitalization near 1.69 trillion dollars, far below its all-time high. Against that risk-off backdrop, SBI's bet is structural rather than directional. By stacking exchange custody, yen and dollar stablecoin rails, and trust-bank licensing under one roof, the group is positioning for the next institutional cycle rather than the current one. Consolidation, not speculation, is the signal here.