Crypto Exchanges
By Steven Anderson
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What the FSA Approval Actually Means. The FSA published a list on Friday that formally put Laser Digital Japan on the books as a…
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Japan's Parliament Rewrites the Rulebook. The license didn't land in a vacuum. Japan's parliament passed amendments in July that reclassify…
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Institutional Momentum and What Comes Next. Japan's crypto market has been through a rough patch in terms of institutional confidence.
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Nomura's crypto arm just got the green light. Laser Digital Japan cleared Japan's Financial Services Agency approval process and now holds the country's first new crypto exchange…
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The last time the FSA handed out a license like this was October 2022, when Binance Japan got the nod. Four years is a long gap.
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Laser Digital isn't planning to go wide immediately. The company's near-term focus is domestic liquidity — building out that foundation before pushing into broader institutional…
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The Nomura backing matters here. Nomura is one of Japan's largest and most established financial institutions, and having that name attached gives Laser Digital a kind of…
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The license didn't land in a vacuum. Japan's parliament passed amendments in July that reclassify crypto assets as financial instruments under the Financial Instruments and…
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Moving to the FIEA changes things considerably. Insider trading rules come into play. Oversight for crypto businesses gets tighter.
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Related: Trumps $1.4 Billion Crypto Profits Ignite Controversy Over GENIUS and Clarity Acts
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Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama said back in January that integrating crypto into the broader financial ecosystem matters for making sure citizens actually benefit from digital…
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The exact date the new rules kick in is still pending. A Cabinet order will set the timeline, and that order is expected within a year of the amendments' promulgation on July 23.
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Japan's crypto market has been through a rough patch in terms of institutional confidence. The collapse of several offshore exchanges hit Japanese retail investors hard, and…
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The shift to the FIEA is the clearest sign yet that Japan is done treating crypto as a fringe payment experiment.
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For Laser Digital, the immediate task is straightforward but not easy: build liquidity, earn trust, and operate within a regulatory environment that's still being finalized.
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