Stablecoins in Japan: Regulatory Architecture, Monetary Strategy, and the Construction of Hybrid Digital Money Infrastructure.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stablecoins have evolved from niche instruments supporting crypto-asset trading into structurally significant components of global payment infrastructure and digital monetary strategy. Japan was among the first major economies to establish a comprehensive legal framework governing fiat-backed stablecoins, embedding issuance within prudential supervision and restricting participation to regulated financial institutions. This early regulatory clarity positioned Japan as a pioneer in stablecoin governance. However, global developments-particularly the rapid expansion of U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoins, which collectively hold over USD 150–180 billion in U.S. Treasury-related assets-have reframed stablecoins as instruments of currency competition and sovereign financial influence. At the same time, multilateral institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Financial Stability Board (FSB) have emphasised the need for governance safeguards, reserve transparency, and cross-border coordination to mitigate systemic risk. This article situates Japan’s stablecoin framework within comparative international policy debates and argues that Japan is moving toward a hybrid digital money architecture. In this emerging model, regulated stablecoins coexist with tokenised deposits and prospective central bank digital currency (CBDC) initiatives. While Japan’s prudential model enhances systemic resilience, maintaining strategic relevance will require interoperability, scalability, and deeper integration into cross-border digital financial networks, particularly in the Asian region.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".