It was a rare sight in Japanese finance. The digital chiefs of the country's three largest banks by total assets, Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo Mitsui and Mizuho, sat together on one stage on the second day of WebX 2026. Between them, the three institutions hold more than $7tn in assets and are the main bank to one in five Japanese companies. The rivals, who rarely cooperate, said in June they would jointly issue a yen-linked stablecoin by the end of the financial year.
It was one of several moments when tokenization moved from concept to execution. Across bank stablecoins, government bonds and venture-backed platforms, the past week showed how digital money is becoming a practical policy and market agenda rather than a distant promise.
Banks' shared token
Akio Isowa of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG) explained why rivals were building it together. A trading house with offices across time zones sees cash build up separately at each office, and manually pooling it can take more than a day. Like a stablecoin on a shared blockchain, the same money settles on its own, around the clock, in a couple of hours. Using one shared token instead of three, he said, spares companies from converting between them, removing the friction the chain was meant to eliminate.
Payment is infrastructure, added Nobuhiro Kaminoyama of Mizuho, and it cannot pay for itself without the volume that three competing tokens would split.
The banks are targeting about ¥1tn ($6.5bn) in settlement volume by 2028. Because the token would be issued by banks, it would be treated as a deposit under Japanese rules and insured like a standard bank account. That places it inside the regulated banking perimeter, unlike offshore dollar stablecoins that operate outside Japan’s deposit insurance framework.
Government bonds onchain
The day's biggest number came from sovereign debt. Japan's government bond (JGB) repo market, where banks and funds borrow cash for short terms against JGBs as collateral, totals ¥250tn ($1.6tn). The question on stage was not whether it would move onchain, but when.
The Japan Securities Clearing Corporation already holds ¥15tn ($96bn) in collateral, much of it in Japanese government bonds, said Toshihiro Akema of JSCC. Moving that collateral on-chain could allow it to be transferred around the clock, rather than only during business hours.
Taro Togo of Digital Asset, which is working with US clearing house DTCC on tokenized US Treasuries, said the firm expected to announce a Japanese equivalent in the second half of the year.
Deposits, already live
While Japan’s megabanks described what they plan to build, one tokenized deposit was already in use. In Ishikawa, a prefecture on Japan’s north-west coast, Hokkoku Bank has operated Tochika, a regional token, since 2024.
When the prefectural government paid a subsidy to help residents cope with rising prices, Tochika became the only way to receive the money. The token now has 230,000 accounts, equivalent to nearly a third of the prefecture’s working-age and adult population.
There was no application process. Residents opened a Tochika account, and the prefecture paid those who qualified the next day, identifying them through digital credentials tied to Japan's existing identification systems rather than compiling a list. The same rail, its operators said, could one day carry wages.
Money market funds, onchain
If deposits are the retail end, the money market fund is where institutions are testing tokenization. Chetan Karkhanis of Franklin Templeton, which put its first fund onchain in 2021, said the tokenized market for money market funds and US Treasuries now holds about $15bn, of which his firm runs 15 to 20%. Against roughly $13tn in conventional liquidity products, that is small but growing fast.
Min Lin of Ondo Finance said its wrapped money market token, introduced nine months ago, had surpassed $1bn in assets, far more quickly than stablecoins reached comparable sizes.
Bonds that pay by the day
Metaplanet, a Tokyo-listed firm and the world's third-largest corporate holder of bitcoin with about 43,000 BTC, according to data tracked by Bitcoin Treasuries, plans to issue bonds and preferred shares backed by its holdings. It will work through Metaplanet Securities, formerly Siiibo Securities, a private-placement bond specialist it bought and renamed this month.
What tokenization changes, said the brokerage's chief executive, Kazuki Komura, is how those bonds pay out. Interest paid twice a year, held in that cycle by manual administrative work, could shift to monthly through security tokens or stablecoins, and eventually, he said, daily.
The law behind it
None of this works without the state, represented by Seiji Kihara, a former finance-ministry official who chairs the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's finance committee and leads its project team on next-generation onchain finance.
The lower house passed a bill in June reclassifying crypto as financial instruments and extending insider-trading rules, now before the upper house. A separate tax measure would cut the top rate on trading gains from 55% to a flat 20%, which the government is targeting for 2028.
Kihara framed the tax cut as a way to widen the base rather than shrink it. Of Japan's 14mn crypto accounts, only about 50,000 declare crypto income, by the tax agency's count. A lower rate, he argued, would bring more of them onto the books and expand the underlying market, so revenue could rise even as the rate fell.
End of the balance
Late in the session, Isowa reduced the case to a simple point. People keep money in deposits because they do not know when they will need it, and companies hold cash as insurance against uncertainty.
If money becomes programmable and moves on-chain, he said, less capital needs to sit idle: companies can borrow when they need liquidity, settle instantly and put incoming funds back to work.
The same conviction had opened the day from the other side of the industry. On a video call from New York, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams told the conference where all of this was heading.
"Most of the world's value will end up onchain," he said, "the way most of the world's information already has [been digitized]."
