SBI Holdings and Startale Group joined Open Standard on October 16, 2026, the 140-plus member alliance behind Open USD (OUSD). The pair will explore a pilot linking OUSD with yen stablecoin JPYSC, which they call a first step toward real-time onchain yen-dollar settlement.
What Happened?
- SBI Holdings and Startale Group joined Open Standard, whose more than 140 members include Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock and Coinbase.
- The two companies will explore interoperability between OUSD and JPYSC, a yen stablecoin issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank.
- The announcement covers only a pilot exploration. No new commercial service, production settlement or trading activity is starting.
- Open Standard says more than 200 financial institutions, fintechs, banks and businesses have signed up to add OUSD to their platforms.
SBI and Startale target yen-dollar convertibility
JPYSC is a trust-type stablecoin issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank. The companies say it complies fully with Japan’s Payment Services Act and trust law framework. It is built for onchain yen settlement, funds transfer and distribution, with tokenized asset trading and cross-border payments in scope.
OUSD sits on the other side of the proposed link. Open Standard describes it as a U.S. dollar stablecoin built for global-scale settlement. Its public onchain launch gives the partnership a base, according to the press release shared with CoinLaw. The stated aim is faster, more efficient settlement between the yen and the dollar, which the release calls the world’s two most-traded currencies.
Yoshitaka Kitao, chairman and president of SBI Holdings, tied the move to the group’s planned SBI APAC Digital Economic Zone. He said:
Kitao added that SBI Group was the first in Japan to offer the dollar stablecoins USDC and RLUSD. That record shows what is new here.
SBI’s earlier dollar-stablecoin moves meant distributing tokens issued by others. The OUSD plan targets conversion between two tokens. One is a yen coin from SBI’s own trust bank. The other is a dollar coin from an alliance SBI just joined.
Startale CEO Sota Watanabe called the yen and the dollar two of the world’s strongest and most trusted currencies. He said Startale aims to connect Japanese assets and financial services with global onchain markets. The route is concrete use cases built with SBI and Open Standard’s partner companies.
The pilot has no timeline yet
The groundwork predates the announcement. In July 2026, SBI Global Asset Management, DigiFT Tech and Startale unveiled a proof-of-concept for settlement and distribution payments on tokenized securities. The companies say they designed it with JPYSC’s future utility in mind. Startale has also kept broadening JPYSC’s real-world use and building institutional-grade trading infrastructure around it.
Open Standard itself is new. It launched in June 2026 with founding partners Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa. SBI and Startale credit the GENIUS Act, the landmark U.S. stablecoin legislation, with speeding up regulated, enterprise-grade stablecoin infrastructure worldwide.
The release leaves several practical points open:
- Which blockchain or bridge would carry a JPYSC-OUSD conversion?
- Who would set and quote the yen-dollar rate inside the pilot?
- When would the pilot start, and what transaction volume would it test?
- Which Japanese and U.S. regulators would review a production version?
For institutions already holding JPYSC or OUSD, nothing changes today. The release states that the move “does not represent the launch of a new commercial service.” No production settlement or trading activity has started either.
What’s Next?
The announcement reads as positioning ahead of a product. SBI is lining up a yen leg for Open Standard’s dollar settlement network before any pilot terms exist. The companies frame deeper integration as a way to strengthen the international liquidity of yen-denominated assets.
The next concrete step is a defined pilot with named chains, partners and scope, run within applicable regulatory frameworks as the companies pledge. Any production yen-dollar settlement would then need its own commercial launch, which the release rules out for now. Until that launch, JPYSC and OUSD remain separate tokens on separate rails.
