Japan’s list of licensed crypto trading firms has a new name after nearly four years of silence. On Aug. 21, Laser Digital Japan, a unit of Nomura Holdings, completed registration as a crypto asset exchange service provider, becoming the first newly added licensed crypto trading institution in Japan since 2022.
Laser Digital Japan is not starting where most retail users would expect. Under its current plan, the company will first provide liquidity to locally licensed crypto service providers in Japan, then expand into digital asset trading services for institutional investors.
For a company backed by a major traditional financial group, receiving this license after four years without a new comparable entrant is notable on its own. The bigger story, though, is not simply that Japan has approved another license holder. The country’s crypto market is moving into a deeper reshuffle.
From early mover to four years without a new entrant
Japan was one of the first countries to put a formal regulatory framework in place for crypto trading. Back in 2017, it introduced a registration regime for crypto asset exchange businesses, requiring companies that offer services such as crypto-to-fiat exchange in Japan to obtain registration.
After major incidents at platforms including Coincheck, where large-scale asset thefts occurred, the regulatory stance quickly shifted toward risk control. In a 2019 reform, Japan tightened rules around customer asset management, advertising and marketing, trade monitoring, and market manipulation, while also requiring customer crypto assets in principle to be managed through methods such as cold wallets. That reform raised the operating bar and shaped the market structure for years afterward.
Running a full-scale crypto trading institution in Japan comes with substantial costs in compliance, system security, asset management, and internal governance. Market entry is not just about building a trading engine. Firms have to show that they can meet a set of long-term risk management standards that look much closer to those applied to financial institutions.
That is why Japan, despite recognizing the legal status of crypto trading early, gradually developed a tightly controlled licensed market with a limited number of participants. Existing players have been able to broaden products and services, but direct entry by new firms has remained difficult.
Laser Digital’s own path is a case in point. Nomura set up the digital asset business subsidiary Laser Digital in 2022 and established its Japan entity in 2023. Even with backing from one of Japan’s largest securities groups and access to global compliance and risk management systems, the company did not move quickly through market entry. From planting its flag in Japan to completing crypto asset exchange registration in August 2026, the process took close to three years.
That long wait helps explain why the intended use of the license may matter more than the approval itself.
Why Nomura is starting with institutional business
A scarce license like this would normally invite a straightforward move into retail trading. Laser Digital has chosen a different route. Based on the plan now disclosed, Laser Digital Japan will first serve domestic VASPs in Japan by supplying liquidity through its trading capabilities, before pushing into digital asset trading services for institutional investors.
Retail has long been one of the most profitable client segments for crypto exchanges. Individual trades may be smaller, but the user base is broad, activity is frequent, and fee rates are often much higher than those charged to institutions. Coinbase offers one comparison: in 2025, consumer transaction revenue was about $3.3 billion, while institutional transaction revenue was under $500 million, even though institutions contributed much higher trading volume.
For Nomura, however, the central question is not which segment looks richer on paper. It is which segment best matches the resources and strengths the firm already has.
Japan’s retail crypto market is already mature after more than a decade of development. Platforms such as Coincheck, bitFlyer, bitbank, SBI VC Trade, GMO Coin, and Binance Japan have spent years building users, apps, brands, payment rails, and operating systems. If Laser Digital wanted to compete for retail flow from zero, it would need to build marketing, user acquisition, customer service, and ongoing user operations, while also spending heavily on incentives.
The logic in institutional markets is different. When an asset manager, corporate treasury, or family office is preparing to allocate a large amount of capital into digital assets, the questions are usually about depth for large orders, counterparty reliability, custody arrangements, and whether internal compliance and risk teams can sign off.
Those needs fall squarely within the capabilities traditional investment banks know well. Revenue from this kind of business does not stop at trading fees. It can also come from market-making spreads, block trading, and order execution, with room to extend into asset management, custody, and other digital asset services.
Laser Digital’s global business already spans secondary trading and asset management, while Komainu, a Nomura-affiliated company, has built a presence in digital asset custody. Compared with constructing a retail exchange business from scratch, the institutional market is clearly a better fit for Nomura’s existing advantages.
Native crypto exchanges often follow one path: build a user base first, then layer more financial products around those users. A traditional financial institution such as Nomura works the other way around. It already has institutional clients and wants to add crypto into an existing financial service framework.
Earlier this year, Nomura surveyed 518 investment professionals from domestic institutional investors, family offices, and public-interest corporations in Japan. The results showed that 65% viewed crypto assets as a diversification opportunity. Among respondents considering entry into the crypto market over the next three years, 79% already had investment plans, while valuation methods, price volatility, regulation, and counterparty risk remained the main barriers.
For Laser Digital, those barriers are also the business opportunity. Nomura does not need to build another exchange in the mold of Coincheck. It needs to provide liquidity to existing trading platforms, execute block orders for institutional investors, and continue serving those clients through asset management, custody, and derivatives demand.
In that sense, Laser Digital is trying to transplant Nomura’s institutional trading model from traditional capital markets into crypto.
Policy changes are opening the door for traditional finance
Laser Digital is still only one case, and the license by itself has limited meaning. What gives it weight is the change now taking shape in Japan’s policy environment for crypto.
As crypto assets are increasingly held as investment assets, the question of how to place them within the country’s existing capital markets oversight system has become a major item in Japan’s regulatory agenda.
In July 2026, Japan’s parliament passed the Act Partially Amending the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act and the Payment Services Act, setting the direction for moving crypto asset trading oversight from the Payment Services Act to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act. Crypto assets will not automatically be treated as securities such as stocks or bonds, but trading in them will face more capital-markets-style rules on disclosure, unfair trading, and investor protection.
Tax rules are also shifting. Japan’s 2026 tax reform proposal states that, provided the relevant regulatory reforms are implemented, gains from qualifying specified crypto asset transactions would be subject to a separate 20% tax rate, and related losses could be carried forward for three years.
Until now, personal crypto investment gains in Japan have largely been taxed as miscellaneous income under a comprehensive taxation framework, leaving high-income investors facing effective tax rates well above those applied to financial products such as equities. That has long been seen as one of the main constraints on the domestic crypto market. Once the new system is formally in place, the longstanding tax treatment gap between crypto assets and stocks would narrow substantially.
Another change came from the system for electronic payment instruments and crypto asset service intermediaries, which took effect in June this year. It lowers the cost for financial institutions to connect to crypto services from a different angle.
Under the new intermediary mechanism, a company that merely acts on behalf of a licensed institution to mediate crypto asset transactions for clients, without directly taking on full exchange functions such as custody, may not need to obtain a full crypto asset exchange business license on its own.
That means subsidiaries of banking groups, securities platforms, and internet finance platforms may be able to plug crypto services into existing customer channels without building a complete exchange stack themselves.
The combined effect of these policy changes is to gradually reduce the interface cost between crypto and the traditional financial system. As crypto assets become easier to distribute through securities firms, allocate through institutional capital, and combine with existing custody, settlement, and asset management systems, large financial institutions with licenses, client networks, and capital strength become better positioned to extend their businesses into crypto.
That opens the door to a market division of labor that looks more like traditional finance: one group controls customer access, another provides liquidity, another handles execution, another safeguards assets, and another packages those capabilities into funds, ETFs, or other investment products.
In the past, large financial groups entering crypto often did so by acquiring or operating crypto trading platforms. The next contest may focus more on liquidity, institutional brokerage, asset management, custody, stablecoins, and settlement networks. Laser Digital’s new license places it in the trading and liquidity layer.
For traditional financial institutions, the opportunity is no longer the same as it was a few years ago. When crypto was viewed mainly as a high-risk emerging trading market, the legacy advantages of major banks and securities firms were less obvious. As the market broadens into investment products, institutional trading, custody, stablecoins, and settlement, their licenses, capital, client reach, and risk management systems start to matter much more.
As Japan redesigns the connections between crypto and traditional capital markets, one key question for the next phase will be who secures those positions linking capital, products, and clients first. Laser Digital has already shown Nomura’s answer.