SBI Group, one of Japan’s largest financial conglomerates with the USD equivalent of over $200 billion in total assets, and Chainlink, the industry-standard oracle platform, announced a strategic partnership to accelerate global blockchain and digital asset adoption.
The collaboration will combine SBI’s deep market expertise with Chainlink’s secure, reliable data and interoperability infrastructure to power innovative use cases related to tokenized real-world assets and regulated stablecoins with an initial focus on the Japanese market.
A recent survey of over 50 financial institutions across Asia conducted by SBI Digital Asset Holdings, SBI’s digital asset arm, showed 76% plan to invest in tokenized securities to benefit from key features such as lower costs and shorter settlement periods. Participants cited a lack of institutional-grade market infrastructure as the primary barrier to wider digital asset adoption.
As the standard for onchain finance, Chainlink has enabled over $25 trillion in transaction value and offers a full stack of web3 services that support a spectrum of tokenized asset and stablecoin issuers including some of the world’s largest financial institutions, such as ANZ and Fidelity International.
To bridge the gap between traditional finance and the tokenized asset economy, SBI Group and Japanese financial services companies will leverage Chainlink services such as Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), SmartData for net asset value (NAV), and Proof of Reserve to unlock the secondary market liquidity of tokenized assets while enhancing operational efficiency and seamlessly meeting compliance and privacy requirements.
Previously, Chainlink, UBS Asset Management, and SBI Digital Markets – a subsidiary of SBI Digital Asset Holdings – completed a pilot demonstrating how CCIP can streamline tokenized fund operations across different blockchains and financial systems as part of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian. This capability could ultimately create new standards for operational efficiency and transparency within the $63 trillion mutual fund industry.
“Chainlink is a natural partner for SBI complementing our financial footprint with their market leading interoperability and reliability onchain,” said Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director, President and CEO of SBI Holdings, in an official announcement.
“With our combined strengths, we are delighted to be working together on developing groundbreaking, secure, compliance-focused solutions, including powering compliant cross-border transactions using stablecoins, that accelerate the widespread adoption of digital assets in Japan and the region.”
“We have been building very advanced fund tokenization and stablecoin DvP use cases with SBI for a while now, and I am excited to see our great work move towards a state of production usage at a large scale,” added Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov.
“SBI’s choice to rely on the Chainlink standard for their digital asset transactions shows that the security/reliability, compliance features, and cross-border connectivity of Chainlink are what is needed to do high-value institutional transactions.”