Japan’s Financial Services Agency has approved a fourth stablecoin pilot under its Payment Innovation Project, extending the program into cross-border trade finance. The new test will examine whether stablecoin-based settlement can be used in export finance through the TradeWaltz trade-document platform.
The September 29 approval brings together several participants from earlier projects, including Japan’s three megabanks, and adds trade finance to the set of payment use cases the regulator has cleared through the initiative. The agency said it will publish compliance and supervisory findings after the trial concludes, though it has not given an end date.
How the pilot is structured
The pilot is led through TradeWaltz and is designed around a specific part of the export process. Stablecoin payments are triggered only after a bank approval workflow begins with an exporter uploading shipping documents on TradeWaltz and ends when the bank signs off on purchasing the resulting export receivable.
At this stage, the only transaction leg open to participants is the receivable purchase and settlement between an exporter and its bank. The source article says the scope could later widen to include importers and their banks, but that expansion remains prospective rather than part of the current approval.
Banks and technology firms involved
The FSA notice names Mizuho Bank, MUFG Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking among the participating lenders, alongside TradeWaltz and NTT Data. Mizuho, MUFG, and SMBC had already taken part in earlier projects and are returning for this fourth pilot.
According to the source article, the participating financial institutions will jointly examine the settlement token used in the program. That token is linked to the trust-backed yen stablecoin that the three megabanks have already been developing under the first Payment Innovation Project pilot.
The article notes that the four banks together hold about $6.8 trillion in assets, underlining the scale of the institutions involved even though the present experiment remains limited to a defined trade-finance workflow.
Where the project sits in the FSA program
This approval is the fourth under the Payment Innovation Project and the fifteenth overall since the FSA launched its FinTech Proof-of-Concept Hub in 2017. The payments-focused PIP track began on November 7, 2025, and is run by specialists in blockchain, financial law, and overseas trends, according to the source article.
The regulator framed the pilot as another supervised test rather than a final market rollout. If the model eventually reaches full deployment, the article says it could shorten the time exporters wait to receive funds and allow banks to automate payment instructions and receipt confirmation.
What comes next
The trust-backed yen stablecoin connected to the earlier pilot is expected to be ready for live commercial transactions during the fiscal year ending in March 2027, based on the source article. For now, however, the newly approved trade-finance pilot is set to run from September 2026 with no fixed end date announced by the FSA.
Participants have also outlined a broader roadmap that includes electronic bills of lading and smart-contract escrow services to move more of the trade workflow on-chain. More broadly, the pilot fits into Japan’s wider digital-asset policy push, which now includes an FSA Crypto Assets and Stablecoins Division created in August 2026 as part of a plan to reclassify crypto as a financial product and reduce the top tax rate.
Source: Cryptopolitan