SBI Holdings Takes Majority Stake in Coinhako, Adds to $308B AUM Empire

SBI Holdings has closed its acquisition of a majority stake in Singapore’s Coinhako, the Japanese financial conglomerate confirmed, after clearing approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The deal, finalized July 16, adds a decade-old regional crypto platform to a group that already manages $308 billion in assets under custody for more than 14 million users.

The transaction ran through SBI Ventures Asset Pte. Ltd., a subsidiary that injected fresh capital into Coinhako’s parent company, Holdbuild Pte. Ltd., and separately bought out existing shareholders. With the deal closed, Coinhako is now a consolidated subsidiary of SBI Holdings rather than an independent operator.

Coinhako runs its business through two licensed entities: Hako Technology Pte. Ltd., which holds a Major Payment Institution license from MAS, and Alpha Hako Ltd., a crypto asset service provider registered with the British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission. Those licenses give SBI an immediate, regulated foothold in Singapore rather than a startup application queue.

A corridor, not a single acquisition

SBI Holdings CEO Yoshitaka Kitao framed the purchase as one piece of a larger network-building effort. “The SBI Group seeks to establish a global corridor for digital assets by connecting exchanges worldwide,” Kitao said.

The company wants to fuse Coinhako’s decade of Southeast Asian customer relationships and operating expertise with its own balance sheet and technology stack. The stated goal is a digital asset corridor linking Japan and Southeast Asia, with settlement increasingly routed through SBI’s yen-denominated JPYSC stablecoin. That token cannot yet be transferred to external wallets, limiting its use for now to internal settlement rather than open retail circulation.

The Coinhako deal did not land in isolation. A day earlier, SBI announced a tokenization partnership with Ondo Finance to bring Japanese equities and other assets on-chain, using JPYSC for settlement. Separately, the Solana Foundation is taking an equity stake in SBI R3 Japan, which will be rebranded SBI Solana Global and focused on stablecoin issuance and tokenizing real-world assets such as corporate bonds and real estate.

Building the full value chain

The Coinhako acquisition follows a string of recent moves that point toward vertical control of the digital asset stack rather than opportunistic trading exposure. SBI has also lined up a planned purchase of Tokyo-based exchange Bitbank and has taken positions in EDX Markets and Gauntlet, according to reporting on the group’s recent activity.

Taken together, the licensing, exchange ownership, stablecoin infrastructure and tokenization partnerships suggest SBI is assembling regulated on- and off-ramps across multiple jurisdictions at once, rather than betting on a single market cycle. For investors watching Asia’s crypto infrastructure race, the scale of the underlying company — $308 billion in custodied assets and a user base above 14 million — signals this is balance-sheet-backed expansion, not a speculative side bet.

For Coinhako users and Southeast Asian traders, the immediate practical change is ownership: their exchange now sits inside a much larger, regulated Japanese financial group with cross-border ambitions, which could bring deeper liquidity and new stablecoin rails, but also tighter compliance oversight going forward.

Sources

• bitcoinmagazine.com
• coindesk.com