Japan moves government bonds on-chain with 24/7 trading and stablecoin settlement — as early as this year!

Japan is preparing to tokenize government bonds, bringing them on-chain with round-the-clock trading and stablecoin-based settlement targeted for launch as early as 2025. The move marks one of the most significant sovereign debt digitization efforts from a G7 economy to date.

Settling government bonds via stablecoin rails eliminates the legacy T+2 clearing window and opens Japanese debt markets to a global pool of investors operating across time zones. For the broader tokenized real-world asset thesis, a sovereign bond program of this scale would serve as a high-visibility proof of concept that institutional-grade fixed income can run natively on public or permissioned chain infrastructure.

Japan has been quietly building its digital asset regulatory framework over the past two years, and this initiative signals the government is now willing to put sovereign paper — not just pilot…