- 10 June 2022
- Posted by: Cryptovalues
- Category: Cryptovalues News, World News
There is interest in the digital sector in Japan, and there is no shortage of interest from institutional investors who see the fall in prices as an opportunity for their own and their clients’ investments.
Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, one of Japan’s leading financial groups, has decided to enter the cryptocurrency custody sector.
The company has announced that it will launch a digital asset custody company in cooperation with Bitbank, a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange.
The resulting company will be called Japan Digital Asset Trust and will be 15% owned by Sumitomo Mitsui Trust and 85% owned by Bitbank. It will focus on cryptocurrency and NFT custody for institutional clients.
The group joins a Japanese context, where there are already several banks that are active in the crypto sector: a couple of weeks ago, also in those latitudes, the Japanese banking giant Nomura started offering derivatives based on BTC.
These are OTC financial instruments, whose transactions will be permitted in the Singapore office, with guaranteed access to all of the group’s customers in Asia.
About the new Sumitomo-Bitbank partnership, the company’s capital will be ¥300 million ($2.3 million) at the beginning, and the two companies are waiting for other investors to reach ¥10 billion ($78 million).
Local media reports that the aim of the move is to win over the local institutional market, which still sees the custody problem as a deterrent to investing in these new products, and yet another entry into the market by companies such as Sumitomo in recent months will allow institutional investors to operate in the spot market without any particular resistance.
