After a near four-year silence, Japan's official list of crypto asset trading licenses has finally welcomed a new player—on August 21, Laser Digital Japan, a subsidiary of Nomura Holdings, completed its registration as a crypto asset exchange operator, becoming the first new crypto trading institution in Japan since 2022.

Unlike crypto exchanges familiar to ordinary investors, Laser Digital Japan is not prepared to start by competing for retail investors. Its initial business plan is primarily aimed at licensed crypto service providers in Japan, providing liquidity to these platforms, and subsequently offering digital asset trading services to institutional investors.

As a company under a traditional financial giant, obtaining a license in Japan after four years without the addition of similar institutions is already noteworthy. However, what’s truly interesting is not just that Japan has finally gained a new licensee, but that a deeper change is occurring in Japan's crypto market beyond merely "reissuing licenses."

From Global Pioneer to Four Years Without New Players

Japan is one of the first countries in the world to establish a formal regulatory framework for crypto trading. As early as 2017, Japan officially implemented a registration system for crypto asset exchanges, requiring companies providing services for exchanging crypto assets with fiat currency within its borders to obtain registration.

With the occurrence of large-scale asset thefts on crypto platforms like Coincheck, Japan's regulatory approach rapidly shifted towards risk control. During the reform of regulations in 2019, Japan implemented strengthened management of customer assets, advertising marketing, transaction monitoring, and market manipulation oversight, and required that customer crypto assets are managed primarily in cold wallets. This regulatory reform increased the operational thresholds for platforms and shaped the rules governing Japan's market in the years that followed.

Operating a comprehensive crypto trading institution in Japan entails considerable compliance, system security, asset management, and internal governance costs. The key to entering the market is not only to provide a trading system but also to prove that the company can consistently meet a set of risk management standards similar to those of financial institutions.

Therefore, although Japan recognized the legal status of crypto trading early on, it gradually formed a licensed market with limited numbers and strict entry requirements. Existing players can continuously expand their business and product offerings, but it is not easy for new entities to enter the market directly.

In fact, Laser Digital’s own experience is quite representative. Nomura established the digital asset business subsidiary Laser Digital in 2022 and set up a Japan corporation in 2023.

For an institution backed by one of Japan's largest securities groups, equipped with a global compliance and risk management system, gaining market access has still not been a quick process. It took nearly three years from making their presence felt in the Japanese market until completing the registration for the crypto asset exchange by August 2026.

Because obtaining this license was such a challenge, how Laser Digital plans to utilize the license, after securing it, is even more worth paying attention to than the approval itself.

After Acquiring a Scarce License, Why Is Nomura Focusing on Institutional Business?

With such a scarce license in hand, one might instinctively think of directly engaging in retail trading. However, Laser Digital has not taken this route. According to the currently announced plan, Laser Digital Japan first intends to serve local licensed virtual asset service providers (VASP), providing liquidity through its trading capabilities for these platforms, and afterward, further develop digital asset trading services aimed at institutional investors.

Retail investors have always been one of the most profitable client groups for crypto exchanges. Although the transaction amounts are not large for individual trades, the user base is vast, the trading frequency is high, and the fee rates are usually far above those of institutional clients. For instance, Coinbase's consumer trading revenue was approximately $3.3 billion in 2025, while institutional trading revenue was less than $500 million, with institutions contributing trading volumes much higher than retail.

The issue for Nomura is that the real comparison needed is not which is more profitable between retail and institutional business, but which business is better suited to leverage its existing resource advantages.

After more than a decade of development, the retail trading market in Japan has matured significantly. Platforms like Coincheck, bitFlyer, bitbank, SBI VC Trade, GMO Coin, and Binance Japan have operated for many years, possessing ready-made users, apps, brands, payment channels, and operational systems. If Laser Digital wants to compete for retail clients from scratch, it would need to rebuild its marketing, customer acquisition, customer service, and user operations systems, requiring substantial subsidy costs.

In contrast, the competition logic in the institutional market is completely different. When an asset management company, corporate treasury, or family office is ready to allocate large-scale digital assets, they often care more about whether large orders can achieve sufficient depth, whether counterparties are reliable, how assets are custodied, and whether their internal compliance and risk management departments accept such methods.

These concerns fall precisely within the traditional investment banks' area of expertise. The revenue from such institutional business is not solely derived from trading fees but can also come from market-making spreads, block trades, and order execution, further extending to asset management, custody, and other digital asset services.

Laser Digital's global business already covers secondary trading and asset management, with Nomura's affiliate Komainu focusing on digital asset custody. Compared to starting from zero to build a retail business, the institutional market is evidently more suitable for Nomura to leverage its strengths.

For native crypto exchanges, their path typically involves first acquiring users and then adding more financial products around those users. Traditional financial institutions like Nomura, on the other hand, already have institutional clients and are looking to integrate crypto into their existing financial service system.

At the beginning of this year, Nomura surveyed 518 investment professionals from domestic institutional investors, family offices, and public interest corporations in Japan. The results showed that 65% of respondents regarded crypto assets as a diversification opportunity for asset allocation. Among respondents considering entering the crypto market in the next three years, 79% already have investment plans, while valuation methods, price volatility, regulatory issues, and counterparty risk remain major obstacles.

For Laser Digital, these obstacles and entry thresholds in themselves are business opportunities. Thus, Nomura does not need to create another exchange like Coincheck. It only needs to provide liquidity for existing trading platforms, execute large orders for institutional investors, and continue to meet these clients' asset management, custody, and derivatives needs.

From this perspective, Laser Digital is actually attempting to replicate the institutional trading model that Nomura has used for decades in traditional capital markets within the cryptocurrency sector.

The Regulatory Climate Is Changing, Traditional Finance Is Starting to Position Itself

After all, Laser Digital is still just an isolated case, and the significance of this license remains limited. What makes it worth noting is the ongoing transformation of the policy environment surrounding Japan's crypto industry.

As crypto assets are increasingly held as investment assets, how to integrate them within the existing capital market regulatory framework has become an important topic for Japan’s regulatory reforms.

In July 2026, Japan's National Diet passed the amendment to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act and the Funds Settlement Act, establishing the direction of transferring crypto asset trading regulation from the Funds Settlement Act to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act. Crypto assets will not be directly viewed as “securities” like stocks or bonds; however, their trading will more closely adhere to capital market rules concerning information disclosure, unfair trading, and investor protection.

Moreover, the tax system is also changing simultaneously. Japan’s tax reform for the 2026 fiscal year has proposed, under the premise of implementing the relevant regulatory reforms, to apply a 20% separate taxation on the gains from specific crypto asset trades that meet certain conditions, allowing related losses to be carried forward for three years.

In the past, individual crypto investment gains in Japan were primarily subject to comprehensive taxation as miscellaneous income, and high-income investors faced effective tax rates significantly higher than those for financial products like stocks. This has long been regarded as one of the significant constraints on the development of Japan's crypto market. Once the relevant systems are officially implemented, the long-standing tax disparities between crypto assets and stocks will be significantly reduced.

In addition to the aforementioned positive changes, the “Electronic Payment Means and Crypto Asset Service Intermediary Business” system implemented in June of this year has reduced the costs for financial institutions to access cryptocurrencies from another angle.

Under the new intermediary mechanism, if businesses merely provide mediation services for crypto asset trading on behalf of licensed institutions, without directly assuming the complete functions of a trading platform such as asset custody, they will not necessarily need to obtain a full crypto asset exchange license themselves.

This means that in the future, banking group subsidiaries, securities firms, and internet financial platforms will have the opportunity to incorporate crypto asset services into existing customer channels without necessarily building a complete trading platform from scratch.

The combined effect of these institutional changes is a gradual reduction of interface costs between cryptocurrencies and traditional financial systems. When crypto assets can be more easily distributed by securities firms, allocated by institutional funds, and integrated with existing custody, settlement, and asset management systems, large financial institutions with licenses, customer networks, and capital strength will naturally find it easier to extend their existing businesses into the cryptocurrency space.

This could lead to a more traditional financial industry structure: some hold customer access, some provide liquidity, some handle trade execution, some safeguard assets, while others bundle these capabilities into funds, ETFs, or other investment products.

In the past, large financial groups' involvement in the cryptocurrency industry typically involved acquiring and operating crypto trading platforms. In the future, they might increasingly compete for liquidity, institutional brokerage, asset management, custody, stablecoins, and settlement networks. By acquiring a license this time, Laser Digital occupies a position within the trading and liquidity segment of this market.

For traditional financial institutions, the opportunities arising from this change are quite different from those several years ago. When cryptocurrencies were mainly seen as a high-risk emerging trading market, the traditional advantages of large banks and securities firms were not distinctly significant; however, as the market begins to involve investment products, institutional trading, custody, stablecoins, and settlement, the licenses, capital, customer networks, and risk management capabilities of these companies begin to gain importance.

As Japan redefines the connection between crypto and traditional capital markets, one of the critical factors in the next round of competition may be who can first occupy these key positions connecting funds, products, and clients. And Laser Digital has already provided Nomura's answer.

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