SBI Now Runs Rival Crypto Empires on Solana and XRP

• SBI Holdings owns roughly 9% of Ripple Labs.
• SBI VC Trade launched Solana trading and custody services in partnership with Tokyo-listed WIZE.
• SBI’s Ripple-side products already reach over two million shareholder accounts.

Every headline out of Tokyo this week called it a Solana bet. What the coverage missed is that SBI Holdings did not abandon anything to get here. The same conglomerate that just rebranded SBI R3 Japan into SBI Solana Global also holds close to 9% of Ripple Labs directly, a position Kitao has valued at nearly $10 billion when combined with the group’s XRP holdings. SBI’s Ripple partnership is still expanding at the same time SBI Solana Global is standing up, on parallel tracks that started separately and never crossed.

SBI VC Trade Was Already Running Solana Custody Before the Equity Deal

SBI VC Trade, the group’s institutional trading arm, launched Solana custody and treasury management services in partnership with WIZE, a Tokyo-listed media company, on June 4, roughly five weeks before the Solana Foundation equity deal became public. That earlier move already gave SBI operational experience managing SOL at the custody level, through a smaller-scale deployment aimed at one corporate client’s treasury needs. SBI didn’t need the Foundation deal to start using Solana. It already had. The July 13 announcement scales that same custody relationship into a group-wide venture with SMFG behind it.

On the Ripple side, SBI spent the same months deepening a relationship that dates to 2016, when the two firms formed the joint venture SBI Ripple Asia. In March, SBI VC Trade began distributing Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin RLUSD in Japan, backed by Deloitte-attested reserves that stood near $1.57 billion against 1.49 billion tokens in circulation as of February. In May, six SBI-listed subsidiaries, including SBI Shinsei Bank, began paying XRP rewards directly to shareholders who held at least 100 shares as of a March record date, a program that had reached over two million qualifying accounts. None of that activity paused or slowed when the Solana Foundation deal was finalized.

The domestic backdrop explains the urgency on both tracks. Japan’s Financial Services Agency counts more than 13 million registered crypto accounts, roughly one in ten residents, with holdings above ¥5 trillion, and its Working Group on Crypto-asset Systems published a report in February recommending the migration of crypto regulation from the Payment Services Act to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act around 2027. That reclassification would treat crypto assets like traditional financial products and open the path to domestic crypto ETFs. SBI is positioning on both chains before those rules reset the market for every competitor at once.

Ripple’s Deal Sheet vs. XRP’s Chart

Ripple keeps closing bank deals in 2026, and XRP’s chart keeps refusing to notice. Ripple settled a tokenized Treasury redemption with JPMorgan and Mastercard in roughly five seconds in June, and its RLUSD stablecoin, not XRP itself, has captured most of the value from these institutional wins. XRP has traded between $1.30 and $1.50 for most of 2026 despite the deal flow, a pattern that has led analysts to separate Ripple’s corporate success from XRP’s price performance. That disconnect gives SBI a second revenue channel that doesn’t rise or fall with XRP’s price chart. XRP’s spot funds still hold more in cumulative inflows, $1.48 billion against Solana’s $1.13 billion, so the divergence is in direction, not size. Solana’s usage numbers make the appeal concrete. The network processes roughly 3.3 million daily active addresses against the XRP Ledger’s 15,000 to 40,000. It has also generated close to $36.7 million in protocol revenue since the start of 2026, trailing only Ethereum and Tron among major chains. XRPL, over the same stretch, generated closer to $767,000. Solana’s total value locked in DeFi has run past $5 billion at points this year, compared with under $40 million on XRPL. For a bank that needs settlement rails with deep transaction volume and active liquidity, those figures argue for diversification regardless of which token holds the stronger regulatory story in the United States. That gap is the whole argument.

What Happens If the CLARITY Act Passes First

What happens to this arrangement if the CLARITY Act passes and gives XRP the statutory clarity Ripple has been waiting on? That single legislative outcome could shift the balance of SBI’s own internal capital allocation between the two chains faster than either partnership announcement did. Other Japanese megabanks now have proof that a single conglomerate can run XRP settlement, RLUSD distribution, and Solana tokenization as three separate product lines under one roof.