Japan’s SBI Group Partners with Chainlink to Launch Tokenized Assets in Asia-Pacific

SBI Group, Japan’s financial giant, has announced a strategic partnership with Chainlink. This partnership with the blockchain oracle provider lays the foundation for building Asia’s tokenized asset ecosystem. The project will first be released in the Japanese crypto market before it is expanded to the broader Asia-Pacific region. The aim of this partnership is to mix blockchain innovation with traditional finance.

This will be done through cross-chain transactions, tokenization of real-world assets such as bonds, and on-chain verification of stablecoin reserves.

SBI Group Partners with Chainlink

SBI’s goal is to integrate Chainlink’s interoperability protocols and secure data feeds to offer enhanced transparency to investors. This will also streamline financial operations such as cross-border payments and foreign exchange settlements. Sergey Nazarov, Chainlink co-founder, has highlighted that this collaboration happened after years of joint experimentation with SBI in areas like stablecoin settlement and fund tokenization. He stressed that the two companies are now progressing toward production-level implementations at scale.

SBI Holdings CEO Yoshitaka Kitao underscored the broader vision, stating that the initiative supports compliant cross-border stablecoin transactions and accelerates digital asset adoption not only in Japan but throughout Asia. Kitao’s remarks are well-timed as Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) is preparing to approve the country’s very first yen-pegged stablecoin next month.

SBI recently unveiled that they have collaborated with Circle, Startale (a Web3 infrastructure firm), and Ripple. With these partnerships, SBI will become a regional leader in tokenized finance. SBI’s crypto subsidiary company, SBI VC Trade, plans to roll out Ripple’s Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin by March 2026, while simultaneously promoting Circle’s USDC in Japan. The Startale collaboration, meanwhile, will deliver a new on-chain trading platform for tokenized stocks and assets, designed to operate 24/7 in a manner similar to platforms like Kraken and Robinhood.

In a similar scenario that shows Japan's growing involvement in global crypto markets, Metaplanet Inc., the country's biggest corporate Bitcoin holder, reached a major milestone in FTSE Russell's September 2025 Semi-Annual Review. The company went from being a small-cap to a mid-cap company, which meant it could be included in both the FTSE Japan Index and the FTSE All-World Index, which monitors the biggest publicly traded companies in the world.

The boost is a result of Metaplanet's strong success in the second quarter and is expected to bring in more institutional capital, which will indirectly lead to more traditional investment in Bitcoin. According to its Q2 financial report, Metaplanet recorded year-to-date gains of 187% by August, far outperforming the TOPIX Core 30 Index, which rose only 7.2% over the same period.

Metaplanet currently has 18,991 BTC in its corporate treasury, making it the seventh-largest publicly traded Bitcoin holder in the world, ahead of well-known companies like Coinbase, Tesla, and Hut 8. The company has said in public that it wants to get 210,000 BTC by 2027, which shows that it is making a big long-term bet on Bitcoin as a reserve asset.

SBI's push to tokenize and Metaplanet's ascent around the world show that Japan is becoming more and more important in the adoption of digital assets. The country is slowly becoming a major center for blockchain innovation in Asia as banks test out tokenized bonds and cross-chain payments, and companies put a lot of their treasury assets into Bitcoin.