Japan
CoinPost
Japan's FSA Requests Roughly 1.33 Billion Yen for Digital Finance Initiatives — 15 Times Last Year's Budget
- The FSA's total budget request is 40.3 billion yen, up 13.4 billion yen from the prior year, with the digital finance initiative positioned under a 4.8 billion yen pillar for growth investment to realize a "strong economy"; the digital finance budget request had stayed below 100 million yen from fiscal 2023's 69 million yen through fiscal 2026's 88.22 million yen.
- Of the agency-wide request for 32 additional staff (net increase of 14 after factoring in staffing rationalization), 13 positions target new financial services, including a new section head role to strengthen monitoring of crypto-asset exchange operators and expanded oversight of electronic payment instrument service providers, alongside digital payment advancement and frontier AI risk response.
- Under its Fintech Proof-of-Concept Hub, the FSA launched the Payment Innovation Project (PIP) supporting the three megabanks' joint issuance of a yen-denominated stablecoin for cross-border remittance use and interbank transfer of tokenized deposits, and co-chaired the FATF Virtual Assets Contact Group driving implementation of Recommendation 15 (the travel rule) and discussions on risks from stablecoins, peer-to-peer transactions, and DeFi.