Ripple Partner SBI Completes Takeover of Japanese Exchange Bitbank

The Deal

The final share transfer went through on Oct. 1, making Bitbank a wholly owned subsidiary of SBI. The price tag was approximately $290 million (¥46.7 billion), the same number given when the deal was first announced in June.

The deal was a three-step transaction and followed the steps laid out in SBI’s June 25 notice:

• First, SBICAH GK, a wholly owned SBI unit, bought shares from Bitbank CEO Noriyuki Hirosue and other individual shareholders
• Second, SBICAH subscribed to a third-party allotment of new Bitbank shares
• Third, Bitbank used that cash to buy back every share held by Mixi and Ceres as treasury stock

The first step covered 53,704 shares, and the allotment created 48,952 new ones. The whole package needed clearance from the Japan Fair Trade Commission before it could close. For customers, the exchange says nothing changes and accounts, trading, and services carry on as before.

Who Sits Where Now?

The ownership change came with a board swap as Tomohiko Kondo, president of SBI’s existing exchange SBI VC Trade, joined Bitbank’s board. Hirosue stayed on as Bitbank’s CEO and became an outside director at SBI VC Trade. Three Bitbank outside directors, namely Satoshi Takagi, Nobuhiro Kanayama and Masaya Kubota, stepped down.

Each exchange now has a seat inside the other, which points to closer integration rather than a passive holding. SBI has done this before when it folded Bitpoint Japan into SBI VC Trade in April, with Bitbank now looking set to be the next piece of the same plan.

SBI is also buying a clean security record, as Bitbank “has maintained zero hacking incidents” since it was founded.

Why Should XRP Traders Care?

Bitbank is one of Japan’s busiest XRP venues, and at press time, 5.82 million XRP had changed hands on the exchange’s XRP/JPY market (over the past 24 hours). In fact, Bitbank is one of the few exchanges where XRP comes close to matching bitcoin’s daily turnover.

These volumes now sit inside a group that has worked with Ripple for about a decade, and in August 2025, the two signed a memorandum of understanding to bring Ripple USD (RLUSD) to Japan. That stablecoin went live in Japan through SBI VC Trade on June 24, following approval from the Japan Financial Services Agency. RLUSD’s total supply has since passed $2.4 billion globally.

What Does SBI Get Out of It?

Scale is the most obvious answer here. To elaborate, adding the April 30 figures of SBI VC Trade and Bitbank together gives the group about $6.97 billion (¥1.1 trillion) in assets under custody and roughly 2.92 million crypto accounts. That would put it first among Japanese exchange operators by custodied assets.

Lastly, when the deal was announced, Bitcoin.com News noted it could create Japan’s largest crypto exchange, something that is now a fact rather than a forecast.

SBI also said the merged business would build “new financial services utilizing stablecoins,” plans that are now already moving. A yen stablecoin, JPYSC, for instance, is in development through SBI Shinsei Trust Bank, and SBI has further completed a Korea-Japan cross-border stablecoin test last month.