Overview
- The Financial Services Agency announced on Wednesday that a new Cryptocurrency and Stablecoin Division will take effect on Aug. 7 and elevate crypto work from office level to a standalone department.
- The division will house three offices — a Cryptocurrency Monitoring Office for exchange supervision, an Innovation Promotion Office for fintech policy, and a Digital Payment Planning Office for stablecoin and payment strategy.
- The organizational move follows mid‑July amendments that reclassified crypto as financial instruments, added disclosure and insider‑trading rules, and raised maximum penalties for unregistered operators from three years in prison and ¥3 million in fines to ten years and ¥10 million.
- Regulators have stepped up enforcement of registration rules against offshore platforms, with exchanges such as Bitget announcing a phased exit from Japan after prior warnings from the FSA and local finance bureaus.
- Key market outcomes — a separate crypto tax regime (targeted around a 20% effective rate with three‑year loss carryforwards) and approval of domestic spot ETFs — still require FSA rulemaking, cabinet orders and amended fund rules, with tax changes currently projected around 2028.