プログラマブル円：2026年に始動する日本の三層ステーブルコイン基盤

Masaaki Taira, former Minister for Digital Affairs and now acting chair of the LDP’s new AI × On-Chain Finance Project Team, told a Tech for Impact Summit audience in April 2026 that “AI can’t have a bank account, so it’s stablecoins.” By then the rails were already laid.

Three weeks before he spoke, MUFG, SMBC and Mizuho received regulatory clearance to begin issuing a joint yen-pegged stablecoin from March 2026 under Project Pax, with a target of one trillion yen (roughly $6.5 billion) in circulation by 2028. Six months before that, on October 27, 2025, the privately held issuer JPYC had launched the first regulated, fund-transfer-licensed yen stablecoin in Japan. By Q2 2026, SBI Shinsei Trust Bank expects to launch JPYSC, the country’s first trust-bank-backed yen stablecoin, with SBI Holdings and Startale Group.

Japan’s 2023 Payment Services Act amendment allows stablecoin issuance through three kinds of licensed entity. As of this year, all three lanes have an issuer in them, which no other major economy can say.

The Three-Lane Architecture

On June 1, 2023, amendments to Japan’s Payment Services Act came into force and introduced a new legal category, the electronic payment instrument (EPI), defined under Article 2, paragraph 5. It sits apart from cryptoassets, electronic money and CBDC, so fiat-pegged stablecoins got a regulatory category of their own.

Under the Financial Services Agency framework, digital-money-type stablecoins may be issued by three classes of licensed domestic entity: banks, fund-transfer service providers and trust companies. Algorithmic and crypto-collateralised “stablecoins” do not qualify and stay regulated as cryptoassets. Every issuer must hold 100% reserves, guarantee on-demand redemption at par, and report continuously to the FSA.

Three years on, each of the three lanes has a flagship vehicle live or cleared to launch.

Lane 1 — Banks: Progmat and Project Pax

Progmat, a digital-asset infrastructure platform spun out of MUFG with NTT Data and several regional banks, runs the ledger. MUFG, SMBC and Mizuho built Project Pax on top of it with the blockchain middleware firm Datachain. Corporate clients initiate payments through the SWIFT-compatible banking dashboards they already use; the banks pick up the instruction on the back end and settle across Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche and Cosmos through stablecoin smart contracts.

Industry reporting puts the reach at roughly 300,000 corporate clients across the three megabanks. Mitsubishi Corporation has begun using Progmat-issued stablecoins to settle intra-group flows between its Tokyo headquarters and overseas subsidiaries.

The March 2026 limited launch window was set to Japan’s fiscal year-end so that the rollout lands inside FY2026 corporate planning. US-dollar integration is slated for late 2026. The 2028 target is one trillion yen in issuance across the three banks combined.

Lane 2 — Fund-Transfer Service: JPYC

JPYC issued the first regulated yen stablecoin in Japan on October 27, 2025, under a fund-transfer service-provider licence. In April 2026 the FSA formally designated JPYC a money transfer service provider, the same supervision regime that covers PayPay and Rakuten Pay.

The fund-transfer category is tiered by per-transaction value. Under the Payment Services Act, money transfer businesses fall into three subtypes: Type 1 (no upper limit, full permission required), Type 2 (up to ¥1 million per transaction, registration required), and Type 3 (up to ¥50,000 per transaction, registration required). The tiers were drawn for human payments. They now also cap how much value a fund-transfer-licensed stablecoin can move per call, which bears on everything from retail payments to micropayments fired off by software agents.

JPYC is not a bank. It has taken on bank-grade obligations (100% backing, redemption guarantees, FSA reporting) as a tech-native issuer, which makes it the nearest Japanese analogue to Circle’s USDC, denominated in yen, issued under Japanese law, and supervised under the same statute as the country’s largest e-money apps.

Lane 3 — Trust Banks: JPYSC

JPYSC is being issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank with SBI Holdings and Sota Watanabe’s Startale Group, with launch targeted for Q2 2026. A trust-issued EPI sits inside a trust account, segregated from the issuer’s balance sheet by law. For a treasurer holding a large balance, that is a cleaner bankruptcy-remoteness position than a deposit-equivalent claim on a megabank.

For corporate treasuries, sovereign-wealth allocators and custodial reserves controlled by AI agents, the legal status of the asset at issuer default decides whether a large balance can be held at all. Among major economies, Japan’s trust-bank lane is so far the only regulated structure that settles that question for a stablecoin.

The Foreign-Currency Window: USDC in Japan

On March 4, 2025, SBI VC Trade became the first exchange approved to handle Circle’s USDC under the revamped Payment Services Act, with trading from March 26. Circle set up a local subsidiary, Circle Japan KK, and a joint venture with SBI Holdings. In the second half of 2025 SBI VC Trade added a retail USDC lending product on top. Japanese corporates can now pay each other in regulated yen on-chain, and Japanese retail and institutional users can hold regulated dollars on-chain at the same compliance grade.

Why Agentic AI Lands Here

KYC, account opening and beneficial-ownership disclosure all assume a person or a company at the other end, so an autonomous AI agent cannot hold a bank account. It can hold and spend EPIs through a smart-contract wallet that its human or corporate principal controls.

Agents will settle in whichever stablecoins their principals’ banks and lawyers already accept. In Japan that now means three regulated issuance lanes (megabanks, fund-transfer fintechs, trust banks), SWIFT-compatible corporate dashboards on Progmat, trust-segregated balances through JPYSC, and a licensed window for USDC. Taira and the LDP’s On-Chain Finance Project Team expect enterprise AI-to-AI payments to run on this set-up by 2027–2028, while the EU is still harmonizing its rulebook and the US is still legislating state by state.

What 2026 Unlocks

Three concrete things happen this year. Inside the Project Pax pilot, Japanese megabanks start settling trade finance with emerging-market counterparties on-chain instead of through correspondent accounts. JPYSC gives a treasurer a yen balance that sits in a trust, outside the issuer’s estate, so it can be held at sizes a deposit claim would not support. JPYC, as a designated money transfer service provider, can carry the small, frequent payments (up to ¥1 million per transaction under Type 2) that software agents are starting to make.

What is still open is which institution clears the first transaction on each lane, and whether banks outside Japan connect to Progmat or wait.

Tech for Impact Summit 2027 meets next May in Tokyo with these questions on the agenda. If you are building, funding, or regulating yen or dollar stablecoin rails, or the agents that will pay over them, you belong in the room. Invitations for our partner and speaker cohort are open now — start a conversation with the T4IS team.