SBI completes $289 million Bitbank takeover to lead Japan’s crypto market

SBI has vaulted to the lead among Japanese exchanges by custodied assets after SBI Holdings completed the Bitbank buyout that folded the company into its financial group as a wholly owned subsidiary on October 1.

The deal, which closed for ¥46.7 billion (about $289 million), won’t change much for the roughly 960,000 Bitbank users with registered accounts, with services not subject to any significant changes per the disclosure.

The companies first disclosed in late June that they had signed binding agreements, after capital and business tie-up talks from earlier in the year.

SBI closes deal to buy Bitbank

Per Bitbank’s corporate announcement, the SBI acquisition was completed in multiple stages, with SBICAH, a wholly owned SBI unit, serving as the vehicle.

Instead of one single purchase, SBICAH first bought 53,704 shares from Bitbank founder and CEO Noriyuki Hirosue and other individual holders.

Next came a third-party allotment where the exchange issued 48,952 new shares to the SBI unit. Finally, the cash from the third-party allotment bankrolled the final step, where Bitbank repurchased the stakes held by MIXI and Ceres, its two largest corporate backers.

The repurchases completed on October 1 retired the remaining steps, leaving SBI as Bitbank’s sole parent.

Bitbank reshuffled its leadership alongside the ownership change

The deal to acquire Bitbank was announced along with the president of SBI VC Trade, SBI’s existing exchange arm, Tomohiko Kondo, taking a director seat at the exchange. Hirosue will become an outside director at SBI VC Trade while remaining as representative director, president, and CEO.

As part of the new structure, Satoshi Takagi, Nobuhiro Kanayama and Masaya Kubota left their roles as outside directors on the board.

Why did SBI buy an unprofitable exchange?

As Architect Partners mentioned after the deal was signed, SBI paid $289 million to acquire Bitbank for scale under regulation, rather than earnings.

Adding Bitbank’s roughly ¥570 billion ($3.5 billion) in custodied assets and nearly a million accounts lifts the combined SBI platform to about ¥1.1 trillion in assets under custody across some 2.92 million accounts, based on end-of-April figures, enough to rank first among domestic operators by custodied assets.

Bitbank also brings a Financial Services Agency license, deep altcoin liquidity and an institutional custody business, capabilities Architect Partners said would be slow and expensive for SBI to build on its own.

“We expect consolidation to continue,” wrote the firm’s co-founder Steve Payne, who named bitFlyer, the last large independent, as “an obvious next domino.”

Bitbank stressed that nothing changes for “bitbank” service users. The exchange said it looks forward to leveraging SBI Group’s financing, customer base and management resources to grow its exchange and other digital-asset lines.

Another notch in SBI’s acquisition run

Bitbank extends a years-long buying streak rather than a one-off. SBI VC Trade absorbed TaoTao in 2020, took on DMM Bitcoin’s accounts and custody assets after that exchange collapsed following a 2024 hack. SBI fully absorbed Bitpoint Japan in April 2026 after first buying into the exchange back in 2022.

The backdrop is a changing rulebook. Japan is moving crypto assets under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, the law that governs stocks and securities, with legislation that would also cut the tax on crypto gains to a flat 20%.

Those changes raise compliance and capital costs for smaller standalone platforms, which analysts cite as a driver of the current wave of deals.