SBI Holdings completed its buyout of Bitbank on October 1, folding the exchange into its financial group as a wholly owned subsidiary and vaulting SBI to the lead among Japanese crypto exchanges by custodied assets.

The deal closed at ¥46.7 billion, about $289 million. Per the disclosure, the roughly 960,000 users with registered Bitbank accounts will see no significant changes to their services.

The companies first disclosed binding agreements in late June, following capital and business tie-up talks held earlier in the year.

A Multi-Stage Transaction

Per Bitbank's corporate announcement, the acquisition was completed in multiple stages, with SBICAH, a wholly owned SBI unit, serving as the vehicle.

Rather than a single purchase, SBICAH first bought 53,704 shares from Bitbank founder and CEO Noriyuki Hirosue and other individual holders. A third-party allotment, Japan's version of a private placement to a handpicked investor, followed, in which the exchange issued 48,952 new shares to the SBI unit. The cash raised through that allotment then bankrolled the final step, in which Bitbank repurchased the stakes held by MIXI and Ceres, its two largest corporate backers. The repurchases, completed on October 1, retired the remaining steps and left SBI as Bitbank's sole parent.

Leadership Reshuffle Alongside the Ownership Change

The acquisition was announced along with board changes. Tomohiko Kondo, president of SBI VC Trade, SBI's existing exchange arm, took a director seat at Bitbank. Hirosue will become an outside director at SBI VC Trade while remaining representative director, president, and CEO of the exchange. As part of the new structure, Satoshi Takagi, Nobuhiro Kanayama, and Masaya Kubota left their roles as outside directors on the board.

Buying Scale, Not Earnings

As Architect Partners noted after the deal was signed, SBI paid $289 million to acquire Bitbank for scale under regulation rather than earnings. Bitbank brings roughly ¥570 billion ($3.5 billion) in custodied assets — the customer assets held in custody on a platform — and close to a million accounts. Based on end-of-April figures, the combination lifts the SBI platform to about ¥1.1 trillion in assets under custody across some 2.92 million accounts, enough to rank first among domestic operators by custodied assets.

Bitbank also contributes a Financial Services Agency license, deep altcoin liquidity, and an institutional custody business — capabilities that Architect Partners said would be slow and expensive for SBI to build on its own.

"We expect consolidation to continue," wrote the firm's co-founder Steve Payne, who named bitFlyer, the last large independent exchange, as "an obvious next domino."

Bitbank stressed that nothing changes for users of the "bitbank" service. The exchange said it looks forward to leveraging SBI Group's financing, customer base, and management resources to grow its exchange and other digital-asset lines.

Another Notch in SBI's Acquisition Run

Bitbank extends a years-long buying streak rather than standing as a one-off. SBI VC Trade absorbed TaoTao in 2020 and took on DMM Bitcoin's accounts and custody assets after that exchange collapsed following a 2024 hack that drained roughly ¥48 billion ($300 million) in bitcoin. SBI fully absorbed Bitpoint Japan in April 2026, after first buying into the exchange back in 2022.

The backdrop is a changing rulebook. Japan is moving crypto assets under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, the law that governs stocks and securities and the supervisory regime Japan's brokerages answer to, with legislation that would also cut the tax on crypto gains to a flat 20%. Those changes raise compliance and capital costs for smaller standalone platforms, which analysts cite as a driver of the current wave of deals.