Japan Grants Its First New Exchange License in Four Years

TOKYO — For four years, Japan’s financial regulator issued no new crypto-exchange licenses. That streak has ended. Laser Digital Japan, backed by the Japanese banking giant Nomura, has been registered as a crypto-asset exchange-service provider — the first new firm to clear Japan’s Financial Services Agency since Binance Japan in October 2022.

Who Laser Digital is

Laser Digital is Nomura’s digital-asset arm, and its Japanese unit will start not by courting retail traders but by supplying liquidity to the country’s existing licensed exchanges. Institutional digital-asset trading, including bitcoin, is slated to follow. Chief executive Jez Mohideen framed the license as a sign Japan’s market is entering a “new phase of maturity” that requires “trusted counterparties and infrastructure” as institutions increase their exposure.

The pedigree is the point. A license going to a subsidiary of one of Japan’s largest banks — rather than a crypto-native startup — is the kind of on-ramp that lets pension funds and corporates treat bitcoin as an ordinary line on a balance sheet.

The bigger shift underneath

The license lands weeks after a more consequential change. In July, Japan’s parliament passed revisions to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act that reclassify crypto-assets, bitcoin included, as financial instruments rather than mere payment tools. That moves oversight out of payment-services rules and into the regime that governs stocks and bonds — complete with insider-trading protections and disclosure duties.

Practically, that reclassification is the groundwork for a domestic spot bitcoin ETF, a product Japan has lacked while the United States built a multi-hundred-billion-dollar market. A Nomura and Laser Digital survey found 65% of responding Japanese institutional investors see digital assets as a portfolio-diversification tool, and nearly 79% of those plan to allocate over the next three years. The plumbing is being laid to meet that demand.

Bitcoin in Japan is being moved from the payments aisle to the securities aisle — where the institutional money already shops.

The trade-off

Folding bitcoin into securities law is a double-edged upgrade. It confers legitimacy, investor protections, and a path to regulated products; it also subjects holders and platforms to disclosure and insider-trading rules, and tightens the gate on who may operate. A four-year licensing drought ending with a bank subsidiary is a clean illustration of the model Japan is choosing: broad access on paper, granted slowly and to the well-capitalized. For a bitcoin holder, it is maturation with a bureaucratic price tag attached.

Why it matters: Japan is turning bitcoin into a regulated financial instrument and handing the first new market license to a bank — the institutional door, opening one careful step at a time.

Laser Digital’s registration, the four-year gap since Binance Japan (Oct. 2022), CEO Jez Mohideen’s remarks, the July FIEA reclassification, and the 65%/79% survey figures are per the reporting above. Laser Digital’s license and Japan’s FIEA change cover multiple crypto-assets; this piece focuses on the bitcoin-relevant effects. Informational only — not financial advice.