Web3 Veterans on Privacy, Stablecoins & the End of TVL

The most-repeated line from the Tech for Impact Summit 2026 Web3 panel was the one Hironao Kunimitsu used to open it.

“After more than a decade in this industry, the honest conclusion would be — we should’ve just bought Bitcoin and Ethereum and not built any companies.”

Then: “We’re here to make sure that’s not the conclusion.”

Three Japanese Web3 founders took the Stage Dialogue room in Tokyo on April 26, with Kunimitsu moderating from his own seat, no slides. Over forty minutes they went through what worked, what failed, and where each of them is putting the next decade.

The Three Founders on Stage

Hironao Kunimitsu is the founder of gumi Inc., one of Japan’s earliest publicly-listed mobile gaming companies, and currently CEO of Financie, MintTown, and Thirdverse. He is also a partner at gumi Cryptos Capital and an advisor to Trico, an Ethereum-based Digital Asset Treasury initiative. He is based in Singapore.

Sota Watanabe is the founder and CEO of Startale Group, the company behind Soneium — a Layer-2 network developed in partnership with Sony Block Solutions Labs — and Stream, a stablecoin and on-chain finance project developed with SBI Holdings. He is based in New York. (Watanabe also delivered a separate Main Stage session at T4IS 2026, recapped in our Sota Watanabe speaker spotlight.)

Mai Fujimoto is the CEO of zERC20, a privacy protocol designed to bring confidential transactions to every EVM chain, co-founder of INTMAX, and the longtime organizer of Japan Blockchain Week. She is widely known in the Japanese Web3 community as “Miss Bitcoin.” She is based in Zug, Switzerland.

What Didn’t Work

Kunimitsu started with the past three years.

The Web3 gaming experiment, in his telling, is over. Several high-profile titles — including a Captain Tsubasa Web3 game his portfolio touched — failed to retain users at the scale required to sustain a full-economy game. The mini-app distribution wave on Telegram and LINE produced large top-of-funnel numbers — millions of users in aggregate — but, in his account, only a small minority of those users stayed once the speculative incentive dropped away.

He does not think gaming is the wrong category. He thinks token incentives on top of a thin gameplay loop have stopped working, and that founders still in the space have to pick: deeper game design, or move the Web3 layer into infrastructure for other categories.

TVL Is a Vanity Metric

Watanabe turned to the L1 and L2 chains. For two years the assumption was that dozens of Layer-2 networks would each find a niche. He does not think the data supports it. In his view the field narrows to a handful of chains, and the ones left standing own a vertical end to end: a chain, a wallet, a stablecoin and one dominant application.

“TVL is a vanity metric. Fee revenue is the only number that backs a token’s value.” Total Value Locked, he said, is an inventory figure that mostly reflects financial engineering. Fee revenue shows whether anyone pays to use the network.

The Privacy Gap

Fujimoto started with the problem the sector talks about least: an industry named “crypto,” short for cryptography, that offers users almost no privacy. Every transaction is public. Every balance is visible to anyone who can resolve an address.

In January 2025, David Balland, a co-founder of the French hardware-wallet company Ledger, was kidnapped from his home in central France. His captors severed one of his fingers and sent the image to his business partner as part of a ransom demand. He was rescued the following day in a French gendarmerie operation. The case was widely reported.

Fujimoto then told her own story. Years earlier, she had posted a public message about an NFT she owned, then traveled to Singapore for a conference. While she was speaking, a message arrived in her inbox in English: send Ethereum to a specified address immediately, or she would be killed. She filed a police report.

Zero-knowledge proofs, she said, already make it possible to demonstrate facts about a person — that they are over eighteen, that they are a citizen of a particular country, that they hold a particular asset — without revealing the underlying data. ZK-based passport schemes are under active development across the industry. What holds it back, in her view, is that regulators and platforms do not yet accept a ZK proof in place of the raw data. She has spent several years on that conversation and is still in it.

INTMAX, the protocol she co-founded, is a privacy-preserving rollup built to make confidential transfers the default.

Tokenized Real-World Assets and a JPY Stablecoin

The fourth topic was tokenized real-world assets (stocks, bonds, real estate, treasuries) and Japan’s place in that market.

Watanabe said the United States is ahead, and Japan needs a yen-denominated, trust-type stablecoin to participate in the on-chain settlement layer that real-world-asset tokenization will run on. Stream, the project he is building with SBI Holdings, is shipping a yen stablecoin in June. He framed it as the missing piece between Japanese institutional capital and the on-chain RWA market.

Kunimitsu brought up Trico, the Ethereum-based Digital Asset Treasury he advises. It is modelled on MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin treasury strategy, but holds Ethereum. The idea is that productive on-chain assets secured by Ethereum can sit on a corporate balance sheet the way Bitcoin now does for a small but growing set of companies.

AI Agents Will Use Stablecoins Before They Use Banks

The closing topic tied into two other T4IS 2026 sessions from the same day. Yat Siu, on the Main Stage, had argued that AI agents cannot easily open bank accounts, and would therefore need an on-chain settlement layer to function in the economy. Masaaki Taira, the former Minister for Digital Affairs, then announced that the LDP’s Next-Generation AI and On-Chain Finance Task Force was preparing recommendations on exactly that topic, with publication scheduled for after Golden Week.

Watanabe got there from the builder’s side. AI agents will have on-chain accounts long before any brokerage or bank opens one for them, he said, and stablecoins will be how agents pay each other. Of everything the Web3 stack can do today, he considers that the most concrete use.

The Session

Three operators with more than a decade each in the industry spoke for forty minutes without scripts. Kunimitsu’s opening line, that holding the assets would have beaten building companies on them, set the tone. The rest was what each of them is building anyway: Kunimitsu’s Trico treasury, Watanabe’s Stream stablecoin due in June, Fujimoto’s zERC20 and INTMAX.

Fujimoto’s account of the Ledger kidnapping and of the extortion message she received in Singapore was the segment attendees brought up most afterwards.

About the Tech for Impact Summit

The Tech for Impact Summit is an invitation-only executive gathering in Tokyo, convening leaders across business, policy, and culture to deploy high-impact technology against humanity’s most urgent challenges. T4IS 2026 was held on April 26 at Tokyo Garden Terrace Kioi Conference, as a partner event of SusHi Tech Tokyo.

The full Japan Strikes Back panel recording is available on the Tech for Impact Summit YouTube channel. Search “Tech for Impact Summit” to watch the complete session.