SBI Ventures Asset Pte. Ltd. closed a majority stake in Singapore's Coinhako on July 16, folding the city-state's longest-running licensed crypto exchange into a Japanese financial conglomerate that already serves more than 14 million users across brokerage, banking, and insurance. The price was not disclosed.
The deal is the fifth digital-asset move SBI Holdings has announced since late June. The others: a yen-pegged stablecoin called JPYSC, an investment in Bitbank, a stake in EDX Markets, and the launch of SBI Solana Global. Five announcements in five weeks is a pace that stands out even in a busy year for crypto M&A.
How the Coinhako deal works
SBI Ventures Asset obtained Monetary Authority of Singapore approval to inject capital into, and buy shares from existing investors in, Holdbuild Pte. Ltd., the holding entity behind Coinhako. The exchange runs through two regulated arms: Hako Technology Pte. Ltd., which holds a Major Payment Institution licence from the MAS, and Alpha Hako Ltd., registered with the British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission. Co-founders Yusho Liu and Gerry Eng built the platform over roughly a decade; its user base is consistently described as running into the hundreds of thousands.
As Liu wrote on the company blog, joining the SBI group is "the natural next chapter for Coinhako," for a platform that spent ten years navigating one of the world's more demanding regulatory environments.
SBI Holdings chairman Yoshitaka Kitao has framed the acquisition in terms of building "a global corridor for digital assets by connecting exchanges worldwide," language that appears almost verbatim across SBI's other July announcements. That repetition suggests it is the operating thesis, not a talking point written for a single press release.
Not everything in the buildout is finished. The Bitbank transaction still needs Japan's Fair Trade Commission sign-off. JPYSC, the yen stablecoin, remains locked to SBI VC Trade accounts with no external wallet access for now. The corridor SBI is assembling is visible, but several segments are still under construction.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or an investment recommendation.
