Japan needs more convincing of the merits for making cryptocurrency investing easier for its population, the nation’s top regulator said.
While Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) Commissioner Junichi Nakajima said he is open-minded about the potential benefits that assets such as bitcoin possess as a quick and cheap way to send cash, in Japan they are mainly being used for speculation and investment, not as a means of transferring money.
New challenges are coming from a broader proliferation of firms involved in decentralized finance, he said.
“We need to consider carefully whether it is necessary to make it easier for the general public to invest in crypto assets,” said Nakajima, 58, who became head of Japan’s financial regulator last month.
Unlike in the US, where investors now have a multitude of ways to invest in the burgeoning asset class, Japan remains heavily restricted by comparison.
The FSA last month set up a study group of outside experts and is expected to consider regulatory responses to decentralized finance in the coming months, with investors looking to Nakajima for clues on the outlook.
Nakajima was involved in crafting Japan’s first regulatory framework on cryptocurrency assets, including the registration requirement for exchanges in 2017.
The nation has since tightened up, following a massive coin theft at Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck Inc in 2018, which revealed lax internal control and customer protection.
While Nakajima said that the current regulatory framework on cryptocurrency exchanges has been effective in customer protection and countering money laundering, many of the 31 registered exchanges are struggling financially.
Their business situation “is rather tough,” he said.
In the US, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said regulating cryptocurrency exchanges is perhaps the easiest way for the government to get a quick handle on digital token trading, but he is also concerned about new ways people are getting into cryptocurrency, such as peer-to-peer lending on decentralized finance platforms.
A crackdown in China, on exchanges, miners and traders, left some players shifting into lesser-known tokens and decentralized storage technologies.
Nakajima, a career bureaucrat and engineering major from the University of Tokyo, said unlike stocks, cryptocurrency does not have underlying assets and is therefore subject to big price swings. That is one of the reasons the Japanese regulator does not allow cryptocurrency investment trusts, which are considered an easy way for the public to gain exposure to the asset class.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
NATIONAL SECURITY: Intel’s testing of ACM tools despite US government control ‘highlights egregious gaps in US technology protection policies,’ a former official said Chipmaker Intel Corp has tested chipmaking tools this year from a toolmaker with deep roots in China and two overseas units that were targeted by US sanctions, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Intel, which fended off calls for its CEO’s resignation from US President Donald Trump in August over his alleged ties to China, got the tools from ACM Research Inc, a Fremont, California-based producer of chipmaking equipment. Two of ACM’s units, based in Shanghai and South Korea, were among a number of firms barred last year from receiving US technology over claims they have
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
RSS