Japan’s three largest banks, MUFG, SMBC and Mizuho, signed a memorandum of understanding on June 10 to issue a joint yen pegged stablecoin under the supervision of the Financial Services Agency. The consortium, named Project Pax, targets live corporate transactions by March 2027, building on a Financial Services Agency pilot from November 2025, and aims for one trillion yen, roughly 6.5 billion dollars, in business to business stablecoin volume by 2028.
The shift that matters is not that a stablecoin is launching. It is who is issuing it and how. These are incumbent megabanks choosing to collaborate rather than compete, issuing through a trust structure in which the three banks act as joint settlors while a trust bank serves as trustee, and running it on Progmat, a blockchain platform that supports Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche and Cosmos. For finance leaders, that combination signals stablecoins moving out of their crypto native origins and into bank operated, regulator supervised settlement infrastructure.
The original insight is that the consortium model is itself a regulatory de risking strategy. By forming a joint council to set rules, systems and governance, and by issuing under FSA oversight through a trust, the banks are pre empting the fragmentation and run risk that worried supervisors about private stablecoins. This is the bank operated counterpart to payment firms launching their own stablecoin rails, and the contrast is instructive: where fintechs move first and seek approval later, the megabanks are building the compliance scaffolding into the issuance structure from day one. The practical takeaway for treasurers and payment strategists is to watch Project Pax as a template for how regulated yen, and eventually other major currencies, will settle on chain, with governance and trustee structures that corporate counterparties can actually underwrite.
Source: CoinDesk.
