Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings is moving into the red-hot tokenized stock market through a joint venture with Singapore-based blockchain development firm Startale.
The companies plan to build an on-chain platform designed for trading tokenized equities and real-world assets (RWAs), they announced on Friday.
The step puts SBI alongside a growing roster of major players experimenting with tokenized stocks. Robinhood and several crypto exchanges including Kraken, Gemini started offering blockchain-based versions of publicly traded shares.
SBI, which oversees more than 11 trillion yen ($74 billion) in assets and has over 65 million customers globally, sees asset tokenization as a major shift in global markets.
“We predict that this movement will eventually lead to the digitalization of capital markets themselves, including exchanges,” Yoshitaka Kitao, president and CEO of SBI Holdings, said in a statement.
The joint venture will focus on 24/7 trading of tokenized U.S. and Japanese stocks with near-instant settlement, the press release said. Features are expected to include fractional ownership, institutional-grade custody and real-time compliance monitoring.
“This platform will be highly interoperable, always open, accessible to anyone, and designed to meet the needs of users worldwide in the global market,” Yoshitaka Kitao said.
Startale previously developed Soneium, an Ethereum layer-2 network, with Japanese tech giant Sony.
Read more: DBS Launches Tokenized Structured Notes on Ethereum, Expanding Investor Access
