Three Megabanks Walk Into a Consortium, Order One Yen Stablecoin to Share 🍣

Three of Japan's largest banks have established a council to jointly develop a yen-pegged stablecoin targeted for practical use by the end of fiscal year 2026, with a US dollar version planned for later in the year. The consortium brings together Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG), and Mizuho Financial Group, building on a pilot that has been operating under the Financial Services Agency's Payment Innovation Project since November 2025. The token will be issued under a trust agreement, with the three banks serving as joint settlors and a "trust bank or similar institution" acting as trustee. It will run on Progmat, a distributed ledger platform developed by MUFG and NTT Data.

The banks are not positioning the token for retail wallets at launch. Their combined enterprise client base covers more than 300,000 companies, giving the instrument immediate distribution scale through existing corporate relationships. The FSA's decision to run the November pilot with all three institutions simultaneously, rather than sequentially, points to a preference for a single shared standard over competing bank-issued tokens. The project aims to verify whether "regulatory and practical compliance" can be carried out "legally and appropriately" when multiple banks jointly issue a stablecoin.

Japan's regulatory framework, updated in 2023 through amendments to the Payment Services Act, restricts approved stablecoin issuance to licensed banks, registered money transfer agents, and trust companies. That structure has enabled a series of yen-pegged launches, including JPYC Inc.'s JPYC in October 2025, SBI Holdings and Startale Group's JPYSC in February 2026, and the Japan Blockchain Foundation's planned EJPY token on Japan Open Chain and Ethereum, announced in May 2026. On the dollar side, USDC became the first US dollar-pegged stablecoin approved in Japan in March 2025, issued by crypto exchange SBI, with Ripple and SBI Holdings announcing plans to launch RLUSD in the country afterward.

The megabank consortium lands as globally licensed banks accelerate their own deposit-token programs. JPMorgan brought JPMD to Coinbase's Base network earlier this year, connecting its Kinexys infrastructure to public rails for institutional clients. SoFi extended its SoFiUSD bank token to roughly 15 million members in May 2026, marking one of the first consumer-facing bank stablecoins in the US. Stablecoin volumes eclipsed ACH network volumes in the United States this year, sharpening competitive pressure on legacy payment infrastructure.

Whether the three Japanese banks ultimately issue a single token under one brand or operate shared rails that each bank draws on separately remains to be determined, and that governance choice will shape how replicable the model becomes for other multi-institution stablecoin efforts. Separately, an SBI Shinsei and JPMorgan deal shows Japan's mid-tier lenders are also pursuing tokenized deposits on parallel tracks.