Sony Bank Plans to Launch Stablecoin in US

Japan’s Sony Bank is reportedly readying the launch of a dollar-pegged stablecoin.

The bank is set to issue the coin as soon as fiscal year 2026, with Sony envisioning them being used to pay for games and anime content, Nikkei reported Monday (Dec. 1).

According to the report, Sony Bank had applied for a U.S. banking license in October, with plans to set up a subsidiary to oversee its stablecoin business. The bank has launched a partnership with U.S.-based stablecoin issuer Bastion, Nikkei wrote.

The report added that Sony expects its American customers who play its video games and consume its other content will use stablecoins to pay for subscriptions, giving the company a path to reduce the fees paid to credit card companies.

The U.S. made up for close to a third of Sony’s overall sales to external customers in the fiscal year ending March of 2025, the report added.

As Nikkei noted, stablecoin circulation is rapidly expanding in the U.S. The market value of the two largest coins — Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC — is approximately $260 billion. This growth is happening in the wake of the GENIUS Act, the first piece of U.S. legislation to create a regulatory framework for the coins.

The act was signed into law in July, but as covered here last week, the policy has yet to be implemented, which has left cryptocurrency firms, stablecoin issuers and would-be stablecoin issuers in limbo. That’s because most important provisions of the act cannot be put into practice until the Treasury Department unveils regulations covering reserve composition, disclosures, affiliate relationships and the exact definition of “yield.”

“That vacuum is now producing follow-on consequences. Arrangers, banks, FinTech lenders and crypto-native issuers are racing to test the boundaries of the statute before regulators have locked down the guardrails and their corresponding definitions,” PYMNTS wrote.

The prospect of stablecoins delivering yield poses a challenge to banks’ central business model, the report added. If consumers can hold a tokenized, Treasury-backed dollar and earn a yield equivalent to or better than a savings account, it could lead to deposit drain at local and regional lenders more sensitive to customer departures than bigger institutional lenders.

“The GENIUS Act represented a partial win for banks. Congress banned stablecoin issuers from paying yield directly,” PYMNTS added. “However, banks say that unless regulators take an expansive interpretation of yield, affiliate structures could become a loophole big enough to reshape the deposit market.”