SMBC Nikko Securities, one of Japan's leading securities firms, and blockchain development company Nethermind have signed a memorandum of understanding with Uniswap Labs, the Base network and the Nyx Foundation, the parties announced on October 2, 2026. The agreement launches a joint effort to build a regulated on-ramp into decentralized finance (DeFi) for Japanese investors.

According to the announcement, the initiative is designed as a regulated DeFi gateway built on Uniswap v4, with a target deployment by mid-2027. Uniswap is a leading decentralized exchange protocol on Ethereum, and UNI is its governance token. Version 4 of the protocol introduced hooks, a feature that lets developers customize how liquidity pools operate. The structure of the deal is notable for readers tracking institutional involvement in DeFi: Japanese brokerages have typically offered crypto exposure through centralized, licensed services, while direct interaction with decentralized protocols has generally sat outside the licensed-intermediary model that governs domestic crypto-asset businesses.

The collaboration pairs participants from traditional finance with teams from the on-chain ecosystem. SMBC Nikko Securities operates under Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG), one of Japan's largest banking groups. Nethermind is a blockchain engineering firm best known for maintaining one of the most widely used Ethereum execution clients. Uniswap Labs is the principal development company behind the Uniswap protocol, and Base is an Ethereum layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase. The Nyx Foundation is named as the fifth party to the memorandum.

The project aligns with Japan's structured approach to digital assets. The country's Financial Services Agency regulates crypto-asset businesses under the Payment Services Act, under which domestic crypto-asset exchange operators must register with the regulator, and the government has identified3 as a strategic growth sector in recent years. Per the announcement, the memorandum is intended to give Japanese investors compliant access to decentralized financial services through a regulated channel.

As a memorandum of understanding, the agreement records the parties' intent to collaborate rather than a completed build, and the mid-2027 target gives the project a timeline: development of the v4-based gateway and its alignment with Japan's regulatory requirements are the near-term markers to watch.

This report was first published by COINOTAG: https://en.coinotag.com/smbc-nikko-uniswap-uni-defi-gateway-mid-2027