Compass Investments

– Japan intends to create a blockchain infrastructure for instant 24/7 settlements of stocks and government bonds.

The FSA, the Ministry of Finance, and the Bank of Japan will form a research group as early as this summer.

According to the development plan, work is scheduled to begin in early 2027, with a full-scale launch possible in the early 2030s.

The Japanese bond market is preparing to adopt blockchain. As reported by Nikkei this week, regulators are aiming to enable instant, round-the-clock settlements for stocks and Japanese government bonds (JGBs).

Although the country has previously conducted pilot tests using blockchain, this is the first time a clear timeline has been established for the systems nationwide implementation.

Operations will begin this summer and are expected to be led by the Financial Services Agency (FSA), the Ministry of Finance, and the Bank of Japan.

They will be joined by banks as part of a working group; the development project is scheduled to be completed by early 2027. The system could become operational in the early 2030s.

Currently, settlements for stock transactions in Tokyo take two days, while those for JGB transactions take one day. The new system will reduce this time to virtually zero. Sellers will be able to reinvest their funds almost instantly.

The benefit will be enormous, since, according to the Ministry of Finance, government bonds and bills totaling approximately 1,166 trillion yen are in circulation in Japan. At the current exchange rate, this amounts to roughly 7 trillion dollars.

Japan has previously implemented modernization gradually. According to the JSCC, the settlement period for JGBs was reduced to one day in 2018. In 2019, the settlement period for stocks was reduced to two days. In the U.S., the settlement period for stocks was reduced to one day in 2024. Eliminating the delay entirely would give Japan the opportunity to pull ahead of everyone else.

Banks are not standing on the sidelines: Japans four largest financial institutions have been implementing a pilot project since April 2026 to use blockchain as collateral for JGBs.

Major Japanese companies are testing the transfer of tokenized collateral for Japanese government bonds via the Canton Network with the goal of enabling round-the-clock bond trading by 2026.

SBI and the Solana Foundation are also developing on-chain finance in Japan based on stablecoins pegged to the yen.”,”detected_source_language”:”RU