Noritaka Okabe, chief executive of JPYC, the issuer of the Japanese yen stablecoin, expects demand for the company's flagship product to surge as more people in Japan seek alternatives to banks going dark.

Okabe promoted his company's yen stablecoin on X on Wednesday after GMO Aozora Net Bank was forced to take its bank API offline on two separate occasions within 12 hours. The bank API disruption's ripple effects reached JPYC's own product, temporarily freezing redemption rails and hitting crypto exchanges including Binance Japan.

Okabe: More bank disruptions, more JPYC demand

In a post on X and a follow-up message on Wednesday, Okabe directly responded to the service outages at GMO Aozora Net Bank to argue that JPYC is best positioned to keep the economy running, making the stablecoin the biggest winner as it helps shore up the overall resilience of the Japanese yen. The bank disclosed the incidents in an official notice.

He conceded that bank freeze periods can affect stablecoin issuance and redemption, but noted that they do not reach public blockchains, which continue to run without interruption while traditional payment rails are suspended. That gap is structural for fiat-backed stablecoins: the ledger runs nonstop, but moving value between yen and tokens has to clear through a banking partner's rails.

The Wednesday posts were not the first time the JPYC chief has taken aim at traditional institutions. In late October, after reports emerged about unauthorized access at financial institutions, he wrote that “Existing finance doesn't have long.” “The lifespan of fiat currency is also uncertain,” Okabe added.

GMO Aozora API goes offline twice

GMO Aozora Net Bank announced late on Tuesday, around 8:42 PM local time (11:42 UTC), that it had suspended its bank API after detecting unauthorized external communication against its API infrastructure. Service was briefly restored at 10:30 PM (13:30 UTC), but the bank pulled the API again at 1:02 AM on Wednesday (16:02 UTC Tuesday), blaming the second outage on additional suspicious traffic. The API was back up at 6:25 AM (21:25 UTC Tuesday), and the bank marked the issue as resolved by 6:30 AM (21:30 UTC Tuesday).

The bank warned that, given the recent spike in cyberattacks, it may take services offline again as a precaution, although it clarified that neither personal data nor funds were threatened during the episode.

Bank APIs let outside services check balances, pull transaction records and push transfers through code. When they go down, connected services stop working as well, although the bank's own deposit accounts and internet banking are typically unaffected.

JPYC redemption, Binance Japan and other partners hit

GMO Aozora's partners were affected during the API halts. One of them was JPYC EX, the platform where JPYC is issued and redeemed for yen. Binance Japan also suspended yen deposits and withdrawals routed through the bank, while BitTrade and accounting software firm freee reported stoppages linked to the bank. With the bank flagging possible further precautionary shutdowns, how reliably yen-side rails stay open for JPYC EX and partner exchanges is the immediate thread to watch.

JPYC is Japan's first regulated yen stablecoin, redeemable 1:1 for yen and backed by yen deposits and government bonds, running on Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon and Kaia. By its first anniversary on October 27, cumulative issuance had passed ¥10 billion, though Okabe told NADA NEWS that circulation sat well below internal targets. “Frankly, I don't think it's growing,” he was quoted as saying.

Okabe has pinned year-two growth on partnerships, including a logistics deal with AZ-COM Maruwa to pay 2,300 carriers and an October 20 memorandum with SBJ Bank and LINE NEXT to link bank accounts to JPYC wallets.

The GMO Aozora halts are separate from the October breach at GMO Internet's Onamae.com Desktop Cloud. The bank says it is a different company with independent systems, and no link between the incidents has been published.