Solana Foundation Takes SBI Stake in Bet on Japan's Onchain Future

The company will be renamed SBI Solana Global, a provisional name, and rebuilt around Solana's public network to issue stablecoins, tokenize real-world assets (RWA) and settle cross-border payments.

Permissioned venture turns public

The move rewires a venture founded on R3's Corda software – permissioned chains built for banks – towards an open, public blockchain, and puts the steward of a Layer-1 network on the share register of a bank-backed Japanese company. It escalates a 2025 technical tie-up between Corda and the Solana Foundation into a capital relationship, and hands Solana a megabank-grade endorsement.

The two sides disclosed few specifics. The joint release did not give the size of the Solana Foundation's stake, the ownership split among the three shareholders, a valuation for the venture or when the rename and the first services would take effect. Sandmark has asked SBI and the Solana Foundation for that detail and had not received a response by publication.

Japan's onchain sprint sets the stage

The timing follows a year in which Japan has moved faster than most jurisdictions to regulate digital money. 

The country widened its stablecoin rules, its three megabanks agreed to jointly issue stablecoins, and SBI has spent 2026 assembling onchain infrastructure – issuing JPYSC, the first trust-based yen stablecoin, buying the exchange bitbank and leading a $76mn round in the institutional venue EDX Markets. 

Wiring Japan's regulated assets into a global public chain is the logical next step. SBI cast the deal as a bid to make Japan the Asian hub for onchain finance and to connect domestic capital to worldwide liquidity.

Case for Solana over Ethereum

The choice of Solana is a wager, not a consensus. Ethereum remains the incumbent home of tokenized funds and treasuries, and only last week Japan's largest trust bank put a BUIDL-style tokenized fund on Ethereum – a rival domestic giant betting the other way.

But Solana has been taking institutional mandates on the strength of speed and cost. JPMorgan settled a Galaxy debt deal on the network in December, and the fund platform Allfunds and payments firm MoneyGram have both moved onto it this year. 

Chains such as Cardano, by contrast, have drawn little of the institutional tokenization flow now concentrating on Solana, Ethereum and Avalanche.

What the bet signals for markets

The stakes differ for each side. For SBI, Solana offers a global reach its own permissioned rails cannot. For Solana, the deal is validation at a delicate moment, when the network wins deals faster than it captures fees. 

And for the wider market, a major financial group placing regulated assets on public-chain infrastructure, in one of the world's most permissive jurisdictions, is a signal worth watching – of which blockchain becomes the settlement layer for institutional finance, and of how far Japan means to lead the onchain era.