Japanese financial conglomerate SBI Holdings has entered into a definitive basic agreement to fully acquire domestic cryptocurrency exchange Bitbank for 46.7 billion yen ($288.6 million). The blockbuster transaction will be executed via SBI’s wholly owned subsidiary, SBICAH LLC, making Bitbank an indirectly held, wholly owned subsidiary with 100% voting rights. The acquisition is scheduled to close around October 2026, pending standard closing conditions and a formal merger clearance review by the Japan Fair Trade Commission.
The phased transaction will see SBI first acquire common shares from Bitbank’s founders and individual shareholders in August 2026. Following a subsequent capital injection from SBI, Bitbank will repurchase all remaining shares held by its existing corporate backers, MIXI Inc. and Ceres Inc., to complete the total buyout by the end of October.
By absorbing Bitbank, an exchange launched in 2014 and widely recognized for its robust security and unblemished “zero hacking” history, SBI is engineering a massive consolidation of the regulated Japanese crypto landscape. A simple aggregation of metrics from Bitbank and SBI’s existing trading arm, SBI VC Trade, will instantly elevate the group to the number one spot in Japan:
- Total customer assets: ~1.1 trillion yen ($6.8 billion)
- Total registered accounts: ~2.92 million users
This combined balance sheet comfortably pushes SBI past local rivals bitFlyer and Coincheck in total digital assets under management. Moving forward, SBI plans to cross-utilize both platforms’ user bases, compliance frameworks, and infrastructure to scale up its retail trading services. Crucially, the unified resource pool will be heavily leveraged to deploy next-generation financial products, focusing specifically on on-chain finance and regional stablecoin liquidity hubs.
