Japan Licensed 85 Payment Firms. Its Stablecoin List Has 2.

Japan has 124 firms registered to plug into bank accounts on a customer's behalf, 85 licensed to move money, and 27 licensed to run a crypto exchange.

It has two registered to handle stablecoins.

Four spreadsheets

The Financial Services Agency publishes each of its registers twice: once as a PDF and once as a spreadsheet. The spreadsheets hold the data as cells, which means the whole register can be counted rather than read.

Four of them cover payments. Funds transfer operators, the licence a remittance firm or a wallet needs. Electronic payment intermediaries, which is Japan's name for open banking. Crypto-asset exchange providers. And electronic payment instruments business operators — the category the 2023 revision of the Payment Services Act created for firms that intermediate stablecoins.

Counting the rows that carry a corporate number: 124, 85, 27 and 2.

The two

SBI VC Trade was registered on 4 March 2025. The file records it as able to handle USDC, RLUSD and JPYSC — a dollar stablecoin, a second dollar stablecoin and a yen one.

Coincheck was registered on 27 August 2026, seventeen months later. It is recorded for USDC alone.

That is the entire register. Japan wrote stablecoins into statute in 2023, built a bespoke licence for the firms that would distribute them, and three years on the list of holders fits in two lines.

It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean. The register covers intermediaries — the firms that handle and distribute electronic payment instruments for others. Issuance sits under a separate regime. And a registration records permission, not activity: the instruments named are what each firm told the agency it may handle, not evidence that anyone is using them.

Everything is in Tokyo

Japan registers these firms through regional Finance Bureaus, and the register shows where each one sits.

Of the 85 funds transfer operators, 78 are with the Kanto bureau, which covers Tokyo. That is 91.8%. Kinki has three, Hokkaido two, Tokai one, Hokuriku one. No other bureau appears in the file at all.

The same pattern holds in the intermediaries register, where the Kanto bureau's subtotal of 108 is most of the national 124.

Sixteen years of licences

The funds transfer register opens on 1 April 2010, the day the Payment Services Act took effect, with five firms registered that day. The most recent entry is dated 17 August 2026.

Between those two dates the pace is uneven rather than rising. Eight firms in 2011, two in 2014, nine in 2018, nine again in 2020, three in 2021. Nine of the dated entries fall in the last twenty-four months.

Seven of the 85 rows do not yield a readable date, so the yearly figures cover 78 and the totals cover all 85. Two years, 2019 and 2024, show no dated entry in this sample; the seven unparsed rows could change that, and this article does not claim those years were empty.

Why this matters

Japan is the third-largest economy to have put stablecoins on a statutory footing, and it did so earlier than most. The usual way to assess how that is going is to read announcements. The register is the other way, and it is free, machine-readable and updated by the regulator itself.

For anyone deciding where to build, the four numbers together say something the announcements do not. The open-banking and funds transfer categories are mature and crowded; the stablecoin category is a licence that almost nobody has taken up yet. Whether that reads as an opening or as a warning depends on why the other 122 firms have not applied, and the register does not say.

It is also a reminder that the honest unit of measurement for a new regime is the register, not the law. Japan's stablecoin framework has existed for three years. Its register has two names on it.

What this is not

These are registers of registration, not of activity. A registered firm may be dormant, and the files record no volumes, no customers and no revenue.

The instrument names in the stablecoin register are what the registrants declared they may handle. They are not evidence that those instruments are circulating or that anyone has transacted in them.

HaiPay did not read the funds transfer register's service-tier columns. In the rows inspected they contain a mixture of circle marks and unrelated numeric values, and the file's merged headers do not resolve cleanly, so no breakdown by tier is reported here.

The registers are amended continuously. These are the figures in the files downloaded on 14 October 2026.

HaiPay did not contact the Financial Services Agency or any firm named here.

What to watch

Whether a third name appears. Seventeen months separated the first registration from the second. A third would be the first evidence of a trend rather than a pair.

Whether the yen stablecoin spreads. JPYSC sits on one firm's line today. If it appears on a second, the register will show it before any announcement does.

And whether anything leaves. These files carry no departure column, so a firm that gives up its registration simply stops appearing. Comparing two downloads a month apart is the only way to see it, and anyone can do that.