SBI CEO Yoshitaka Kitao Answers “Yes” When Asked if He Still Trusts XRP

Kitao’s One-Word Reply

Yoshitaka Kitao, chief executive of Japanese financial group SBI Holdings, answered one word, “YES”, when an X user asked him point-blank whether he still trusts XRP. The reply, posted on his official X account, came in response to a blunt message from the same user, who described recent weeks as “truly exhausting” for people holding the token and said holders feel Ripple has left them behind. Kitao wrote the answer in English, which stands out from his recent activity: most of his posts on the platform are in Japanese, and the remainder are reposts of other accounts. He added no conditions and no further explanation.

@yoshitaka_kitao · X post

On his official X account.

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The endorsement landed while the XRP price sat near $1.03, a level the token reached after shedding 3.7% over the previous 24 hours. In a market already rattled by that slide, a one-word answer from the head of Japan’s most deeply Ripple-aligned financial group traveled quickly through holder communities, because it reads as the view of an institution with direct balance-sheet exposure to Ripple rather than a commentator’s remark. Kitao’s own history explains why his words carry that weight. Before he founded SoftBank Investment in 1999, the company that grew into SBI Holdings, he worked as an executive at Nomura Securities and later served as CFO of SoftBank. SBI today operates banking, brokerage and insurance businesses alongside its crypto services, and its retail arm has distributed digital assets to ordinary shareholders for years. That mix of a traditional financial base and a long crypto build-out is what turns a one-word reply into market news: it comes from a group whose own businesses are tied to the asset, not from an outside voice. The question itself left no room for hedging: did he still trust the asset his group has backed since 2016?

SBI and Ripple Since 2016

The relationship behind the answer goes back a decade. SBI joined Ripple’s Series B funding round in 2016 and, the same year, formed SBI Ripple Asia, a joint venture in which SBI holds roughly 60% and Ripple the remaining 40%. That venture convened a consortium of Japanese banks to test Ripple’s payment technology, and the group later grew to more than 60 member banks. In 2018, SBI launched MoneyTap, an interbank payment app, and opened its crypto exchange, now called SBI VC Trade, with XRP trading available from the first day of operations. Kitao joined Ripple’s board of directors in 2019. The cooperation held through the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit against Ripple, which ran from December 2020 until 2025. From 2020, SBI began handing XRP to shareholders as bonuses, and its remittance service SBI Remit adopted on-demand liquidity for transfers, including the major Japan-Philippines corridor. More recently, SBI VC Trade and Ripple agreed in August 2025 to bring the RLUSD stablecoin to Japan, and in October 2025 SBI invested $200 million in Evernorth, a company that holds XRP in its treasury. SBI VC Trade has since grown past two million accounts.

Kitao’s public position on the token has been consistent. On February 15, 2026, in rare long-form posts in English, he denied rumors that SBI holds $10 billion worth of XRP, writing that the group instead owns around 9% of Ripple Labs and that its hidden asset could therefore be much bigger. At SBI’s quarterly briefing on November 2, 2026, he drew a line between the two assets: investors buy Bitcoin mostly to hold it, he said, while XRP’s value depends on its use in payments and business ecosystems. Each of those steps tied SBI’s retail and institutional businesses more tightly to the token its CEO was asked about.

An Equity Statement, Not Sentiment

For readers tracking XRP news, the reply is best read as an equity statement rather than sentiment. SBI’s exposure runs through roughly 9% of Ripple Labs, a $200 million Evernorth position and an exchange whose two-million-account base feeds the token’s trading volume in Japan, and each line of that exposure pays off only if the ecosystem is actually used, a test Kitao set out on November 2. Holder frustration is priced differently: with XRP near $1.03 after a 3.7% daily slide, retail holders fear being left as exit liquidity while institutional exposure compounds. The slide extends a weak stretch: XRP’s failed $1.30 breakout left the token near $1.08 earlier this month, even as whales bought 65.32 million tokens worth about $72 million into the dip. Whether the token’s market cap recovers will depend on payment adoption rather than endorsements; our XRP technical analysis page tracks support and resistance from here.