Japan's financial group SBI Holdings will acquire cryptocurrency exchange Bitbank for about 46.7 billion yen (445 billion won). Once the deal is completed, SBI will build a cryptocurrency exchange group at Japan's largest level in both assets under custody and customer scale.

Cointelegraph, a blockchain media outlet, reported on June 25 that SBI plans to first buy stakes from Bitbank CEO Noriyuki Hirose (히로스에 노리유키) and existing shareholders through its wholly owned subsidiary SBICAH, and then participate in a third-party allotment capital increase.

After that, if Bitbank buys back shares held by Mixi and Ceres, SBI will complete a structure to indirectly own 100 percent of Bitbank. The deal is expected to be completed around October after regulatory approval procedures.

The acquisition is not limited to a deal to simply increase the size of an exchange. SBI's strategy is to bring Bitbank into the group to expand its crypto exchange business base and customer layer, while also securing distribution channels for stablecoins, tokenised assets and on-chain financial products.

The company said that if Bitbank and existing SBI VC Trade are combined, assets under custody total about 1.1 trillion yen and cryptocurrency accounts about 2.92 million as of the end of April this year. SBI expects that after integration it will rank No. 1 in Japan by assets under custody and also become the largest exchange group by number of accounts.

Bitbank is an exchange whose strength is yen-based trading. According to CoinGecko tallies, recent trading volume was mostly less than $50 million a day, and BTC/JPY trading accounted for 39.5 percent of the total. XRP/JPY and ETH/JPY trading shares are also high at about 19.7 percent each. SBI plans to raise synergies by linking this existing trading base with its financial services.

Analysts say the acquisition is an extension of SBI's recent strategy to expand its digital asset business. In February, SBI and the Startale Group unveiled the layer-1 blockchain Strium to support 24-hour trading and settlement of tokenised stocks and real-world assets (RWA).

On June 24, it also launched the yen-pegged stablecoin JPYSC. JPYSC is issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank, with SBI VC Trade handling distribution.

In the early stage, however, it supports only transfers between accounts within SBI VC Trade. SBI's policy is to expand distribution to public blockchains after legal and tax issues are resolved.

On the same day, Ripple and the SBI Group also launched the dollar-pegged stablecoin RLUSD in Japan. RLUSD began to be provided to both institutional and individual investors through SBI VC Trade after receiving regulatory approval in Japan.

The market is assessing that as SBI pushes ahead in succession with exchange acquisitions and stablecoin launches, it is moving in earnest to tie trading, settlement and tokenised asset distribution into a single ecosystem.

A key point to watch is the regulatory approval process and the timing of the deal's completion. If the incorporation of Bitbank is completed as planned, SBI is expected to secure Japan's largest exchange customer base while also greatly expanding distribution networks for stablecoins and tokenised financial products. In particular, whether the yen stablecoin JPYSC can be distributed in practice on public blockchains in the future is also emerging as a market focus.