Japan’s $74B financial group SBI Holdings is leaning further into digital assets. Revenue jumped 47% to ~$9.5B, profits surged 245% to ~$2.23B, and its crypto unit delivered $460M in revenue with $141M in pre-tax profit — making blockchain a clear growth driver.
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Building on that momentum, SBI Holdings and Startale Group unveiled Strium, a purpose-built Layer-1 blockchain designed to power 24/7 trading and automated settlement for tokenized securities and real-world asset (RWA) products.
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From Pilot Projects to Market Plumbing
Strium is designed as an exchange-layer blockchain — infrastructure that enables always-on trading, faster settlement, and interoperability between traditional financial systems and blockchain networks.
The launch marks the first major milestone from SBI and Startale’s strategic partnership announced in August 2025, with proofs of concept already completed and ready for demonstration.
The timing is deliberate. Tokenized securities are rapidly moving from pilots to plumbing.
ICE (parent of the NYSE) is building a 24/7 tokenized securities platform. Central banks including the ECB and Bank of England are exploring DLT-based collateral frameworks. DTCC and Digital Asset are actively tokenizing U.S. Treasuries held at DTC.
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SBI brings an ecosystem of 80+ million customers spanning securities, banking, asset management, and digital assets — a scale advantage few blockchain-native platforms can match. Strium is designed to support spot and derivatives trading tied to tokenized securities, while remaining compatible with existing financial infrastructure.
The goal is to serve professional and institutional demand for expressing macro, equity, and cross-asset views onchain, with the reliability and compliance expectations of traditional markets.
In short, Strium positions itself as foundational infrastructure for Asia’s onchain capital markets.
Proofs of Concept, Not Promises
Alongside the announcement, SBI and Startale confirmed that multiple proofs of concept are complete, validating:
High-throughput exchange architecture
Faster, automated settlement
Resilience under heavy load
Interoperability with TradFi systems and public blockchains
The platform will open to a limited group of early participants as it advances toward commercial deployment and regulatory engagement.
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A Long-Term Play on Onchain Capital Markets
Strium reflects a broader shift in how major financial institutions are approaching blockchain: not as a parallel system, but as an upgrade path.
As tokenized assets edge toward an estimated $18.9T market opportunity, SBI is positioning itself early — using profits from today’s business to build the rails for tomorrow’s markets
