SBI buys Bitbank for 46.7B yen in Japan exchange consolidation

Japan's largest financial group agreed on June 25 to acquire crypto exchange Bitbank for 46.7 billion yen ($288.6 million), the largest crypto exchange acquisition in Japan's history, as SBI Holdings builds scale under Japan's stricter compliance regime.

Bitbank posted an operating loss in fiscal 2025 as revenue fell 27%, yet SBI agreed to pay roughly eight times revenue. Architect Partners said the multiple is comparable to Coinbase's 9.7x purchase of Deribit and framed the transaction as a bet on regulatory position rather than current earnings.

Bitbank held 570 billion yen ($3.5 billion) in assets under custody and 960,000 customer accounts at announcement. Combined with SBI VC Trade, SBI's existing exchange unit, the merged operation would hold about 1.1 trillion yen ($6.8 billion) in assets under custody across 2.92 million accounts.

That would put SBI ahead of bitFlyer and Coincheck by assets under management, making it Japan's largest regulated crypto exchange operator.

The deal lands after Japan's regulatory overhaul. Legislation passed June 11, 2026 moved crypto assets under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, lowered capital gains tax to a flat 20%, and cleared the way for spot bitcoin and ether ETFs.

The same shift raised the compliance cost floor for licensed exchanges through stricter capital, custody, and disclosure requirements. Industry representatives told Japan's Financial Services Council working group that roughly 90% of the country's registered exchanges are operating at a loss and warned that higher compliance costs could threaten smaller operators.

SBI has been adding licensed crypto capacity through several regulatory cycles. The group previously took over TaoTao in 2020, absorbed DMM Bitcoin's customer accounts in 2024, and folded in Bitpoint Japan in April 2026. Bitbank extends that accumulation rather than marking a one-off distressed purchase.

Architect Partners called the transaction "symptomatic of broader consolidation": "We expect consolidation to continue...bitFlyer, the last large independent and already private-equity owned, is an obvious next domino."

Bitbank will become a wholly owned SBI subsidiary through SBICAH LLC, the group's holding vehicle. The deal is expected to close around October 2026, subject to Japan Fair Trade Commission clearance.