SBI Leads $76 Million Series C Into EDX Markets as Crypto Infrastructure Bet

EDX Markets, the institutional digital asset trading venue whose backers include Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, and Virtu Financial, has closed a $76 million Series C round led by Japan’s SBI Holdings. The proceeds are earmarked for expanding EDX’s trading, clearing, and settlement capabilities alongside its global operations.

The investment is the third move in a fortnight of portfolio reshaping by SBI. The Japanese financial group last week agreed to acquire crypto exchange Bitbank for ¥46.7 billion (approximately $289 million), a transaction that, combined with the existing SBI VC Trade exchange, will give SBI the largest client asset base among Japanese venues by that measure, though bitFlyer retains the lead on trading volume. Separately, subsidiary SBI Crypto announced it will shut its Bitcoin mining pool, which accounts for roughly 2 percent of global network hashrate, at the end of July.

The pattern across these moves is consistent: SBI is rotating away from asset production and toward regulated market infrastructure. SBI chairman Yoshitaka Kitao highlighted the group’s role in launching JPYSC, described as Japan’s first yen stablecoin issued through a trust structure, and its domestic distribution of the dollar stablecoins RLUSD and USDC, framing trusted infrastructure as the critical precondition for institutional adoption at scale.

For operators watching institutional crypto venues, SBI’s entry into EDX’s cap table is notable less for the dollar amount than for what it signals about where a major Asian financial group sees durable margin: the plumbing of settlement and clearing rather than mining or spot exchange volume. EDX’s existing backers already represent a concentration of traditional financial and high-frequency trading capital; SBI’s participation extends that thesis into the Japanese and broader Asian institutional corridor.