Prince Park Tower Tokyo. Japan's prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, did not come. Instead, she sent a two-minute video message on Monday, praising WebX 2026, an annual crypto industry conference in Tokyo, for its startup matching and wishing the conference every success. She did not mention crypto. She did not mention stablecoins. Furthermore, she did not, notably, mention the token that carries her name.
At WebX, Asia Weighs Whether It Needs Its Own Stablecoins
13 July 2026 - 18:14 CEST
By Oihyun Kim
Her predecessors, Fumio Kishida and Shigeru Ishiba, both walked onto WebX stages in person. Takaichi, whose administration is still fielding parliamentary questioning over SANAE TOKEN, the memecoin issued in her name earlier this year, chose the recorded route.
Across the day's programme, which ranged from prediction markets to tokenized securities to Ethereum corporate treasuries, one thread kept surfacing. Whether Asia's countries need their own stablecoins, and what happens if they do not build them.
Case for national stablecoins
Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands, put the question most directly. What, he asked a morning panel, is more sovereign than a country's own currency? Every country, he said, needs a stablecoin of its own. Central bank digital currencies do not work because they lack trust.
Sunayna Tuteja, the former Federal Reserve chief innovation officer sitting beside him, took the American consumer's view. The customer is boss, she said, and if the customer wants US dollar stablecoins, the customer gets US dollar stablecoins.
SBI's Kitao reframes dollar question
Later that afternoon, Yoshitaka Kitao turned Yat Siu's question inside out. The 75-year-old SBI Holdings chair sat down at the lectern and did not stand up again for 52 minutes.
Stablecoins, he told the room, are how the US plans to keep the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Without the GENIUS Act, which US President Donald Trump signed last July, the dollar's share of global reserves would slide from around 70% to 50%, Kitao said.
China, India, Russia and other oil producers are already seeking alternatives to the petrodollar. Japan has been early and slow at the same time, he added. The revised Payment Services Act recognized stablecoins as a settlement instrument in June 2023, ahead of most jurisdictions. Then Japanese regulators bolted on a 1mn yen ($6,400) transaction cap and a permit list that today covers only USD Coin (USDC) and JPYC, the yen stablecoin issued by JPYC Inc.
Some 14mn Japanese already use stablecoins, Kitao said. The regulators, he suggested, are the last to know.
Market moving ahead of permit list
At a closed-door roundtable, industry executives described a Japanese stablecoin market already moving faster than the surrounding permit list regime. Retail use cases are advancing ahead of institutional ones, unusual by global standards, with proof-of-concept pilots running through convenience stores and vending machines.
Corporations sitting on trillion-yen point economies are exploring their own stablecoin issuance. One executive said the endgame was for the word "stablecoin" itself to disappear, leaving only yen and digital yen.
AI agent buys the rice, unattended
Noritaka Okabe, chief executive of JPYC Inc., told Japan Blockchain Week Summit, a lead-up event to WebX, on Sunday that a JPYC user had already used an AI agent to place a household order for 5 kg of rice, with the payment settled in the stablecoin without human intervention. It was machine-to-machine spending on an everyday purchase, not an institutional pilot.
HashPort, a Japanese crypto infrastructure firm, pointed in the same direction at the event. It introduced what it described as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementation, software that lets AI agents hold wallets and settle payments onchain on a user's behalf, rather than routing through an app or a human approval step. Full deployment is expected this autumn.
Taiwan puts a number on the question
Ju Chun Ko, a member of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan, brought the sovereignty question into conJu Chun Ko, a member of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan (Parliament), told Sandmark that he aims to make Taiwan place 0.1% of GDP into digital reserves within 10 years. That is roughly $1bn. The target basket may include tokenized gold, stablecoins, Ether (ETH), and Bitcoin (BTC). Around 5% of Taiwan's supply chain already touches digital assets in some form, Ko added.
Circle sees three years arrive in one
Kenta Sakakibara, who runs Circle's Japan operation, told Japan Blockchain Week Summit on Sunday that what Circle expected to happen in three years is happening in one. USDC nano-payments for AI agents, he said, are moving from concept to institutional pilot faster than any of his internal forecasts had projected.
Circle does not issue USDC in Japan. It distributes through SBI VC Trade under Japan's permit list regime, which currently permits only USDC and JPYC. Sandmark reported this month on the contest between foreign and domestic issuers for an early lead in Japan's stablecoin market. USDG, the newer consortium dollar stablecoin, is not yet approved. Whether the permit list will expand, and how quickly, is a question Japanese regulators have not answered publicly.
Finance minister closes the day
The room stayed full for the day's last session. It had carried through the SBI chair 52 minutes, people standing along the walls and queuing at the door, and almost no one left when Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama took the stage.
Japan's first trust-type yen stablecoin, she said, began operating last month. A cross-ministry programme for blockchain-based settlement, introduced by her ministry in November, has three live pilots. Government bond tokenization, she said, is where Japan's biggest opportunity now sits.
WebX 2026 drew more than 15,000 attendees from more than 100 countries and 3,000 companies, organizers said at the opening. The programme continues Tuesday.
