SBI Holdings completed its $290 million takeover of Bitbank on Oct. 1, making one of Japan's busiest XRP exchanges a wholly owned subsidiary. The combined group now holds roughly $6.97 billion in custodied assets, and Bitbank's integration follows SBI's separate push to bring Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin into Japan.
SBI Closes the Deal
SBI Holdings completed the final share transfer on Oct. 1, making Bitbank a wholly owned subsidiary at a price tag of approximately $290 million (¥46.7 billion) — the same figure given when the deal was announced in June. The transaction ran in three steps: SBICAH GK first bought 53,704 shares from Bitbank CEO Noriyuki Hirosue and other individual shareholders, then subscribed to a third-party allotment of 48,952 new shares, and finally Bitbank used that cash to buy back every share held by Mixi and Ceres as treasury stock. The package needed clearance from the Japan Fair Trade Commission before it could close, and the exchange says customer accounts, trading, and services continue unchanged.
A Board Swap Follows the Takeover
Tomohiko Kondo, president of SBI's existing exchange SBI VC Trade, joined Bitbank's board, while Hirosue stayed on as Bitbank's CEO and became an outside director at SBI VC Trade. Three Bitbank outside directors — Satoshi Takagi, Nobuhiro Kanayama and Masaya Kubota — stepped down. SBI took the same approach in April, when it folded Bitpoint Japan into SBI VC Trade, and Bitbank now looks set to follow that pattern. SBI is also buying a clean security record, since Bitbank has maintained zero hacking incidents since it was founded.
Why XRP Traders Are Watching
Bitbank is one of Japan's busiest XRP venues, and at press time 5.82 million XRP had changed hands on the exchange's XRP/JPY market over the past 24 hours — volume that puts XRP close to matching bitcoin's daily turnover there.
Those flows now sit inside a group that has worked with Ripple for about a decade. In August 2025, the two signed a memorandum of understanding to bring Ripple USD to Japan, and RLUSD went live in the country through SBI VC Trade on June 24 after approval from the Japan Financial Services Agency. RLUSD's total supply has since passed $2.4 billion globally.
The Scale SBI Gains
Combining SBI VC Trade and Bitbank's April 30 figures gives the group about $6.97 billion in custodied assets and roughly 2.92 million crypto accounts, putting it first among Japanese exchange operators by custodied assets. SBI said the merged business would build new financial services using stablecoins, and that work is already moving: a yen stablecoin called JPYSC is in development through SBI Shinsei Trust Bank, and SBI completed a Korea-Japan cross-border stablecoin test last month.
Source: Bitcoin News
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