Mizuho Bank, MUFG Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation reported on October 16 that the yen stablecoin the three banks issue jointly passed a trial run with trading house Mitsubishi Corporation. The result keeps the project on a course to begin live transactions within fiscal 2026, which ends in March 2027, under a program Japan’s financial regulator has backed since November 2025. The ownership arrangement behind the token explains what the banks are trying to build.
The token rests on a shared trust. Mizuho Bank, MUFG Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation are joint trustors, Mitsubishi UFJ Trust Bank is the trustee, and TISI supplies the systems. Issued as specified trust beneficiary rights under Article 2, paragraph 9 of the Payment Services Act, the stablecoin lets several banks stand behind a single instrument without each one running its own issuance program under its own license. That route is the one Japan’s revised payments framework created specifically for bank-issued stablecoins, and it is what allows competing lenders to co-issue a single token instead of each seeking separate permission.
The benefit of pooling shows up in cross-border payments. One yen token means one settlement asset and one set of compliance checks for corporate customers, rather than three bank-specific tokens each carrying its own anti-money-laundering overhead. During the trial, held July 17 to 23, the banks moved money between Mitsubishi Corporation’s Japan and overseas offices through the full cycle of issuing, transferring and redeeming the token, and they reported that the multi-bank model and the underlying systems performed as intended.
The design assumes the token is backed by bank deposits and changes hands only between users who have completed identity checks at a bank, an assumption the banks flag as one that could still shift. They also list user protection, anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing controls, cybersecurity and system stability as areas that still need work before any launch. The regulator’s backing matters here because it keeps the token inside a supervised program rather than leaving the design to a private consortium.
The limits of the trial matter as much as its results. It tested a single corporate use case between two offices of one trading house, not open circulation or retail use, and it says little about how the token would hold up across many counterparties or at volumes that would challenge the dollar stablecoins that dominate global flows today. Scale is the unproven part: one trading house moving money between two offices does not show how the token performs when many companies settle across many corridors at once, which is the condition under which a shared settlement asset actually earns its keep. The March 2027 date is an aim rather than a guarantee, and the banks have not named a first live customer.
Domestic competition is already on the table. SBI issues JPYSC, a yen stablecoin built on its own trust-bank structure, so the megabank token will have to earn adoption against an existing Japanese option as well as against USDT and USDC overseas. The three banks plan to form a joint council to carry the work forward under a memorandum they signed in June. Whether one shared token wins that competition depends on execution the July trial was not designed to measure.
Source: BlockchainReporter.