When a traditional conservative financial country starts paving the way in person, it indicates that this path has been confirmed to lead to real money.

Written by: Conflux

On July 13th, the WebX 2026 held in Tokyo attracted around 15,000 attendees, with Japan's current Prime Minister personally delivering a speech, reiterating that the "Startup Support Package" needs to expand its financial support. Prior to this, former Prime Ministers Fumio Kishida and Shigeru Ishiba had delivered speeches at the past two WebX events—Kishida emphasized tax and regulatory reforms to pave the way for Web3 startups in 2024, while Ishiba went further in 2025, positioning Web3 as the core of a "once-in-a-century" industrial revolution.

The Prime Ministers changed over time, but the act of taking the stage remained constant. Japan's bet on Web3 is not a personal choice of any political figure, but has been written into the long-term agenda of the system.

Also on July 13th, Japan's financial group SBI revealed a bigger card: in a joint announcement with the Solana Foundation, the two parties reached a strategic cooperation to jointly build Japan's on-chain financial market. SBI R3 Japan will collaborate with the Solana Foundation and existing shareholders SBI and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Group, with plans to rename the company to "SBI Solana Global."

Looking backward, SBI Holdings has added several notable figures to its books: a $125 million exclusive investment in Gauntlet, a $76 million investment in EDX Markets, and an acquisition of Bitbank for about $289 million. Calculating it, in a short cycle, SBI has poured close to $500 million into the crypto space.

A more grounded scene occurred at the Takawaguchi store in Tokyo: in early August, Lawson convenience store planned to trial JPYC stablecoin POS payments at this location. Buying a bottle of water, purchasing a rice ball, and checking out with stablecoins—this marks Japan's first time integrating stablecoin payments into a real retail scenario.

Several seemingly unrelated events, when connected, send out a signal: Japan is using national will to open a compliant highway for the crypto industry.

First Layer: Full Bet on License, Capital, and Scenarios

First, let’s look at the actions on the license level. SBI's recent investments aren't scattergun money; each one precisely targets key nodes of the infrastructure.

Gauntlet is a core player in DeFi risk management and on-chain market making, investing in it equates to acquiring the voice right to the "risk control brain"; EDX Markets is backed by Wall Street giants like Citadel and Fidelity, providing an institutional-level crypto trading clearing channel; Bitbank is one of Japan's largest local crypto exchanges, directly gaining traffic entry.

And this step of SBI Solana Global fills in the most crucial piece of the puzzle: the underlying public chain. According to the cooperation agreement, this new company will promote five major businesses around the Solana network—issuance and circulation of the yen stablecoin JPYSC, formation and circulation of corporate bonds and tokenized RWAs, cross-border payment infrastructure, on-chain financial services for institutional investors, and next-generation payment infrastructure for the AI Agent era.

Risk control, clearing, entry, public chain—these four links are all covered at once. This is not just financial investment; this is about positioning in the industry chain.

Next, let’s look at the yen stablecoin JPYSC that SBI has launched, coupled with a 3% annualized loan service—this interest rate, in an environment of long-term zero or even negative rates for the yen, is extremely compelling. As long as some of the cash held by Japanese savers is attracted by this rate, it represents a real migration of funds.

And Lawson's POS pilot turns the stablecoin from "a string of numbers on exchanges" into "money that can be swiped at convenience store cash registers." This step is more critical than all previous capital operations because it touches on the entry rights of payment scenarios—whoever first integrates stablecoins into offline retail networks, holds the appeal of everyday consumers.

Finally, there’s the tax system. The Japanese parliament plans to reduce the capital gains tax on crypto from 55% to 20% by 2028. The significance of this figure is very direct: under a 55% tax rate, both retail and institutional investors tend to keep their assets offshore or simply leave them untouched; lowering it to 20% brings it in line with stocks and futures, meaning that domestic Japanese funds finally have the motivation to "lock in profits" domestically.

Second Layer: The Higher the Threshold, the More Satisfied Are Those Who Get In

On the surface, this looks like the Japanese government is supporting entrepreneurship, SBI is making industrial investments, and Lawson is getting trendy. But the truly worth pondering question is: When a country's regulatory threshold has never been low, who can laugh last?

The answer is clear: the one who can successfully clear all the approval processes first.

Japan's crypto regulation has always been known for its strictness, with high licensing thresholds and long approval cycles, most small and medium-sized institutions can’t even prepare the application materials. But precisely this high threshold keeps most potential competitors outside, leaving a nearly cleared battlefield for a few giants. SBI spent several years acquiring exchanges, clearing channels, and risk control systems all at once, then used the stablecoin business to capture yen liquidity. By the time retail networks like Lawson rolled out payment scenarios, SBI would almost simultaneously gain both licensing and traffic advantages, forming a compliance closed loop that others could not catch up to in the short term.

Comparing makes it clearer: the stablecoin field in the U.S. is a chaotic battle between professional issuers like Circle and traditional financial institutions; while Japan is following the path of "financial groups from chaebols personally intervening.” Mitsubishi UFJ and SBI, these established financial institutions are not just investing in crypto companies but are embedding crypto operations into their existing financial systems. This means that Japan's crypto infrastructure has, from day one, carried the bloodline of traditional finance and regulatory endorsement; the difficulty for small and medium institutions to take a share is much greater than in the U.S. or Singapore.

The same goes for tax rate reductions. On the surface, it appears to provide benefits to ordinary investors, but the real lever pulled by the 20% tax rate is the enormous savings that have accumulated domestically in Japan—once a portion of this money flows into crypto assets, the first to benefit from liquidity bonuses will still be those local players who have completed their licensing positioning and master the entry points. Policy easing is not about dispensing cash but allowing those already inside to quickly capture the new funds flooding in from outside.

Third Layer: A Replicable Model

Bringing the perspective back to the industry itself, Japan's set of tactical combinations provides an observable institutional model: how a country can use "high-threshold licenses + chaebol-level capital + retail scenario pilots + tax incentives" to pull the crypto industry from the gray zone into the mainstream narrative within just a few months.

This holds direct reference value for other jurisdictions—over the past few years, the gray area around stablecoins and crypto operations has largely relied on regulatory vacuums. Japan, Hong Kong, and the UAE are intensively supplementing licenses and tax systems, indicating that the arbitrage space of "running where regulation is loose" is systematically narrowing, and the survival logic of the industry is shifting from "guerrilla warfare" to "grabbing licenses."

Japan's path is stable yet slow. It took SBI several years to piece together this full licensing matrix, and Lawson's trial is just "one store in Takawaguchi." But the direction is already very clear: when a long-established conservative financial country starts paving the way in person, it indicates that this path has been confirmed to lead to real money.