SBI Group Plans to Issue Yen Stablecoin JPYSC as Early as This Week, Nikkei Reports

SBI Group, the Japanese financial conglomerate with $252 billion in total assets, plans to issue JPYSC, its yen-linked stablecoin, as early as this week. Cointelegraph reported Monday morning, citing Nikkei, that SBI has received FSA approval and will proceed with issuance within days. The launch would make SBI the first Japanese financial institution to issue a trust-bank-structured yen stablecoin under the country's Payment Services Act.

SBI Group described JPYSC in its February 2026 press release as "a trust-based stablecoin issued by Shinsei Trust and Banking Co., Ltd., under Japan's regulatory framework." The stablecoin is distributed through SBI VC Trade and co-developed with Singapore-based Startale Group. The official Q2 2026 launch target expires June 30, making the Nikkei-reported this-week timeline the final window of that commitment.

Trust-Bank Mechanics

JPYSC is classified as a Type III Electronic Payment Instrument under Japan's amended Payment Services Act, which took full effect in June 2023 and whose implementing ordinances reached full enforcement on June 13. Under the trust-bank model, token holders receive a trust beneficiary right: a statutory claim on reserves held in a segregated account at SBI Shinsei Trust and Banking, legally ring-fenced from both the issuer's and the trust bank's own balance sheets under the Trust Act.

JPYC Inc. launched Japan's first PSA-licensed yen stablecoin in October 2025 under a Type II fund transfer license, which subjects it to a ¥1 million cap on domestic remittances and balances. SBI's trust-bank classification carries no such cap, per Ledger Insights, opening the door to enterprise treasury settlement and large-volume institutional transactions that the fund-transfer tier cannot legally accommodate.

SBI Chairman Yoshitaka Kitao described the project in December 2025 as intended to "dramatically accelerate the movement toward providing digital financial services that are fully integrated with traditional finance." Startale CEO Sota Watanabe cited AI agent payment rails and tokenized asset distributions as JPYSC's primary intended use cases.

Distribution Rail Live

SBI VC Trade, which holds Japan's first Electronic Payment Instrument Exchange Service Provider registration since March 4, 2025, serves as JPYSC's primary distributor. The subsidiary added Ripple's RLUSD to its lineup in March 2026, demonstrating the distribution infrastructure was live before JPYSC's own issuance. Startale closed a $63 million Series A in late March, led by SBI ($50 million) and Sony ($13 million), with funds earmarked for JPYSC and a companion dollar stablecoin, USDSC.

The deployment blockchain for JPYSC has not been publicly confirmed by SBI or Startale. Startale is the co-developer of Soneium, Sony's Ethereum Layer 2, and unveiled Strium, a new institutional Layer 1, in February 2026, designed for tokenized securities and stablecoin settlement.

Yen Stablecoin Field

SBI's issuance arrives alongside a parallel institutional effort. MUFG, Mizuho, and SMBC established a joint stablecoin council on June 10 and target live interbank transactions by March 31, 2027, using the Progmat platform. The megabank consortium uses the same Type III trust-type EPI classification as JPYSC but is structured as a multi-bank joint issuance rather than a single-entity launch.

Japan passed the first comprehensive stablecoin legislation among G7 economies in 2022, before the EU's MiCA stablecoin provisions and over two years before the US GENIUS Act was signed in July 2025. The June 13 completion of Japan's PSA ordinance enforcement resolved the last regulatory prerequisite for new EPI issuances under the framework.