Why SBI paid $289 million for an unprofitable crypto exchange: Architect Partners

SBI Holdings' (8473) $289 million acquisition of Japanese crypto exchange Bitbank is its biggest consolidation move yet, positioning the financial group to dominate the country's regulated digital-asset market as new rules raise the cost of operating standalone exchanges, according to investment bank Architect Partners.

The purchase reflects SBI's long-running strategy of building scale through mergers and acquisitions rather than organic expansion, the report noted. The company's SBI VC Trade unit absorbed TaoTao in 2020, DMM Bitcoin's customer accounts and custody assets in 2024 and absorbed Bitpoint Japan, wholly owned by SBI since 2023 , in April.

Adding Bitbank, which holds 570 billion yen ($3.5 billion) in assets under custody and 960,000 accounts, would bring the combined platform to roughly 1.1 trillion yen in assets under custody across 2.9 million accounts.

"We expect consolidation to continue," wrote Steve Payne, co-founder and partner of Architect Partners. "With the field set to thin, bitFlyer, the last large independent and already private-equity owned, is an obvious next domino, and foreign platforms that want Japan are more likely to buy a licensed seat than build one."

SBI Holdings is a financial services group with businesses spanning securities, banking, insurance, asset management and venture investing with a market capitalization of about $11 billion. The Tokyo-based company is one of Japan's most active traditional-finance participants in digital assets, with stakes and partnerships across crypto trading, liquidity, tokenization, stablecoins and blockchain-based settlement.

Bitbank is one of the country's largest licensed cryptocurrency exchanges, offering spot trading, custody and other digital-asset services to retail and institutional clients.

Crypto mergers and acquisitions have remained brisk in 2026 as banks, payments firms and exchanges race to build regulated digital asset businesses rather than develop them in-house.

The industry has recorded 144 deals worth $11.8 billion so far this year, according to data from Architect Partners, with buyers increasingly targeting exchanges, custody providers, data firms and stablecoin infrastructure as regulatory clarity draws more institutional capital into the sector.

According to Payne, the Bitbank acquisition is about more than customer growth. The deal brings a Financial Services Agency-licensed exchange, one of Japan's deepest altcoin liquidity pools and an institutional custody business, Japan Digital Asset Trust, giving SBI capabilities that would be far more costly and time-consuming to build internally.

The acquisition comes at a pivotal moment for Japan's crypto industry. Legislation passed by the country's lower house on June 11 would shift crypto assets under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, aligning them with securities regulation. The reforms lower the tax rate on crypto gains to a flat 20% and pave the way for spot bitcoin BTC $ 59,802.06 , ether (ETH) and XRP exchange-traded funds, while simultaneously imposing more stringent capital, custody and disclosure requirements on exchanges.

Architect Partners said those higher compliance costs are likely to accelerate consolidation in a market where roughly 90% of licensed exchanges are already unprofitable and as many as half of the 27 registered exchanges may ultimately disappear.

The report noted that even though Bitbank reported an operating loss as revenue fell 27% in fiscal 2025, SBI agreed to pay roughly eight times revenue. That's close to the 9.7 revenue multiple Coinbase (COIN) paid for Deribit . That valuation makes sense only as a purchase of a regulated market position rather than near-term profitability.

The bank also pointed to SBI's broader digital asset strategy. Alongside the acquisition announcement, SBI unveiled distribution of Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin in Japan, a Visa-branded crypto rewards card and a stablecoin payments initiative, underscoring its ambition to build an integrated platform spanning trading, custody, tokenization, payments and settlement.

Read more: Japanese financial services giant SBI Holdings to buy Bitbank for $289 million

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