Japanese financial conglomerate SBI Group and blockchain oracle provider Chainlink joined forces to facilitate key crypto and digital asset infrastructure use cases for financial institutions in Japan and the wider APAC region.
SBI Group established a strategic partnership with Chainlink to speed up the adoption of blockchain and digital assets among financial institutions.
By joining forces, SBI complements its extensive market knowledge with Chainlink’s trusted infrastructure for secure data sharing and interoperability, which major financial players and DeFi projects across the globe rely on.
Their collaborative work will cover several important use cases, such as making it possible to tokenize real-world assets like real estate and bonds and trade them securely across different blockchains using Chainlink’s interoperability protocol (CCIP). The partnering companies also plan to put fund valuation data on-chain to increase liquidity and streamline operations, enable safer and faster cross-border and FX transactions with payment-versus-payment settlement, and use Chainlink’s Proof of Reserve to ensure stablecoins are transparently backed.
SBI and Chainlink plan to start with Japan, which has both an advanced financial sector and a fast-growing digital asset landscape, offering a strong foundation to test and implement new crypto and blockchain use cases.
SBI and Chainlink are accelerating their efforts on crypto and blockchain because demand from financial institutions is rising quickly. An SBI survey of over 50 institutions found that most are increasingly interested in digital assets, with 76% planning to invest in tokenized securities to gain advantages like lower costs and faster settlement.
At the same time, the biggest obstacle to adoption is the absence of reliable, institutional-grade infrastructure. Since blockchain is the foundation of digital assets, creating secure and scalable interoperability solutions is essential to support adoption and build a complete digital asset ecosystem.
The initiative is not the first time SBI and Chainlink have collaborated. The two firms share a long-standing and highly effective partnership. Their cooperation first came into the spotlight under Singapore’s Project Guardian, where SBI Digital Markets, UBS Asset Management, and Chainlink successfully piloted automated fund administration and transfer agency using smart contracts. This pilot laid the groundwork for their current, deeper strategic alliance, in which SBI’s market expertise complements Chainlink’s robust infrastructure to drive blockchain adoption across APAC.
Chainlink’s Co-Founder, Sergey Nazarov, noted that the teams have for a while been working closely with SBI on advanced fund tokenization and stablecoin delivery-versus-payment (DvP) projects. These efforts are now moving from pilot stages toward large-scale, real-world use.
