SBI Holdings Chief Technology Officer Kefei Lin used the FinTechOn 2026 & AFA summit to outline how the group is moving traditional financial infrastructure onto blockchain rails in a staged, regulation-first process. He said the core lesson is not about chasing technical breakthroughs, but about sequence: establish legal clarity, build market infrastructure layer by layer, and only then open distribution to users and institutions. Lin tied that approach to SBI’s earlier “zero-commission revolution,” which began in 2019 and culminated in 2023 when the group eliminated fees for domestic stock trading after rebuilding its revenue base across financing, proprietary trading, and wholesale finance. Externally, the move was initially seen as risking roughly JPY 16 billion in revenue, but Lin said SBI reached record operating revenue and operating profit because the business model had already been reworked before execution. He also linked SBI’s current on-chain strategy to Japan’s stablecoin law, enacted in 2022 and effective from June 2023, under which SBI launched the compliant yen stablecoin JPYSC in June through SBI Trust Bank and SBI VC Trade. Lin described SBI’s blockchain finance stack as five layers: settlement, assets, markets, on-chain risk management, and distribution.

SBI Holdings has stepped up its digital-asset push through a string of deals that span Japanese retail trading, U.S. institutional market infrastructure, on-chain risk management and stablecoin distribution. In less than a month, the Japanese financial group agreed to acquire licensed exchange Bitbank for 46.7 billion yen, led EDX Markets’ $76 million Series C, made a sole $125 million investment in Gauntlet, and announced a strategic partnership with the Solana Foundation. The sequence marks a noticeable shift for SBI, which has historically favored joint ventures, strategic stakes and outright acquisitions rather than taking the lead in venture rounds. The transactions also line up with several layers of SBI’s broader strategy: retail access in Japan, institutional trading and settlement rails abroad, on-chain treasury and vault management, and a domestic market for regulated stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. Analysts and investors interviewed by The Block said the company appears to be assembling financial “pipes” rather than simply adding crypto exposure, while SBI said the recent acquisitions, investments and partnerships are part of a group-wide move toward an on-chain transition.