Startale Q4 Crypto Round Up

Q4 2025 marked a pivotal shift for crypto. Stablecoins moved from regulatory design to live financial rails, infrastructure began supporting real usage, and onchain systems reached users through familiar payment and app experiences.

Japan offered one of the clearest signals of this shift.

After quietly building one of the world’s most advanced digital asset frameworks, the quarter saw yen stablecoins enter retail, major institutions explore tokenization, and policymakers treat crypto as a core part of long-term economic strategy.

In a market defined by measured participation, focus shifted from hype to tangible outcomes. Innovation prioritized adoption, compliance, and sustainable growth, signaling a broader move from speculation to execution.

Startale Group’s Q4 Crypto Round Up highlights these trends and our role in supporting meaningful adoption in this evolving market.

Stablecoins Are Becoming Real Rails

One of the strongest signals this quarter came from stablecoins.

In Japan, years of legislative work under the revised Payment Services Act have finally resulted in production deployments. In October 2025, JPYC launched the country’s first officially issued yen stablecoin under the new framework, while Japan’s three megabanks revealed plans for a jointly issued yen stablecoin aimed at corporate settlement.

What is emerging is not a single winner, but a display of acceptance towards a diverse stablecoin ecosystem.

On one side, retail focused electronic payment instruments such as JPYC are designed for individuals and small businesses, enabling redeemable yen denominated tokens with continuous settlement and public chain interoperability. On the other, trust based stablecoins led by major banks are being designed for large scale corporate use, with potentially no transfer caps and stronger asset protection under Japan’s new policies.

Together, these approaches point to stablecoins becoming quiet financial rails, serving both everyday payments and institutional settlement.

Startale & Our View on Stablecoins

In December 2025, we made meaningful progress toward our long-term vision for stablecoins as foundational infrastructure for the next generation of onchain finance.

In partnership with SBI Holdings, we advanced the development of a fully regulated Japanese yen denominated stablecoin designed to operate within Japan’s financial regulatory framework and enable compliant, real-time settlement onchain. This initiative combines Startale’s blockchain expertise with SBI’s deep regulatory and financial infrastructure to build a trusted digital yen that supports enterprise grade payments, cross-border connectivity, and programmable settlement rails, positioning Japan at the forefront of regulated digital asset innovation.

Simultaneously, we launched Startale USD (USDSC), a U.S. dollar pegged stablecoin built on M0’s universal stablecoin platform and fully backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries. Startale USD serves as the native digital dollar within the Startale App and broader Soneium ecosystem, powering payments, swaps, transactions, and rewarding engagement through integrated mechanisms like STAR Points. This dollar based settlement layer extends our stablecoin infrastructure beyond a single market, enabling secure, liquid, and scalable onchain utility.

For us, these are not isolated products. They reflect a singular idea: stablecoins as infrastructure, not experiments, but essential building blocks that sit beneath applications, marketplaces, and financial systems, making the movement of value simpler, more reliable, and interoperable across ecosystems.

Why Soneium Matters

In 2025, Soneium emerged as the heartbeat of onchain entertainment, connecting users, creators, and iconic IP across the web3 ecosystem.

Soneium, developed by Sony Group and Startale Group, launched its mainnet in January 2025 and closed the year with remarkable growth:

  • 455 million total transactions processed
  • 5.3 million active wallets
  • 250+ live Apps deployed
  • 3.4 million smart contracts created

Throughout the year, Soneium became a hub for entertainment driven onchain experiences. Major Sony subsidiaries integrated with Soneium, including Sony Music, Sony Pictures (featuring Spider-Man, Sandal Telephone, and other titles), Sony Bank (powering experiences at the Sony JLPGA Championship), and even Sony's iconic aibo robot through an SBT collection.

The network achieved significant milestones, including ranking #2 among layer-2 networks by Rollup.wtf. One of the major highlights for the year was the Startale App integration, along with Startale USD (USDSC) and STAR Points to power future ecosystem activity. Soneium Score boosted the users adoption and their onchain participation, while Startale Superstars emerged as a builder-driven initiative celebrating global web3 ecosystem contributors. Additionally, Japan's largest idol and fashion festival went onchain via IRC App exclusively on Soneium.

Soneium demonstrated how global entertainment IP could live onchain, with partnerships spanning music, fashion, gaming, anime and much more.

Onchain Access at Scale

As crypto becomes more integrated with payments and financial services, adoption depends on both seamless user experience and broad distribution. Expanding access through established networks ensures that intuitive, easy-to-use platforms can reach scale, making onchain activity feel like a natural part of everyday life rather than a separate ecosystem.

The partnership between PayPay and Binance Japan showcased the power of leveraging existing networks. By reaching PayPay’s roughly seventy million users, crypto access expanded rapidly, turning onchain activity into a natural extension of familiar financial tools and achieving scale that would have been difficult to reach independently.

This principle guided our work with the Startale App. By connecting Soneium and Sony users to onchain applications, assets and rewards, the App demonstrates how broad distribution and simplified onboarding can make crypto tangible and easy to engage with. Onchain activity becomes accessible at scale, ensuring infrastructure and stablecoins deliver real value to everyday users.

To extend this approach to institutional markets, we pursued a joint venture with SBI Holdings, a global financial group with 65 million customers worldwide, leveraging the reach and capabilities of an established network to build a 24/7 onchain trading platform for tokenized stocks and real world assets. This partnership enables continuous trading, cross border settlement, and access to tokenized financial products for a broad audience, demonstrating how strategic collaborations can unlock adoption and make onchain systems widely accessible.

Together, Startale is bridging crypto innovation with real-world adoption, driven by collaboration and execution.

Looking Ahead

In 2026, we expect to see:

  • Stablecoins and digital currency rails integrated deeply with everyday payments and settlement systems, enabling greater mainstream adoption.
  • Tokenization of real-world assets and finance-focused chains will move beyond concept into competitive utility, enabling solutions like 24/7 perpetual trading and other instruments that unlock liquidity, broaden access and enhance settlement efficiency.
  • Entertainment and AI onchain applications driving new engagement models, creating seamless experiences and enabling digital assets to power gaming, media, and creator economies.
  • Mainstream usage of onchain finance tools, where users and institutions interact with blockchain through familiar interfaces and regulated channels.

In 2026, Startale is focused on turning blockchain’s potential into reality, building systems that make crypto usable not just for builders, but for everyday users, enterprises, and global financial flows. Inspired by the U.S. market’s push toward regulated, scalable digital finance, our priority is execution, delivering onchain applications that are reliable, integrated, and built for real world use cases.