SBI Buys About 20% of Indonesia's Ajaib to Push Its Yen Stablecoin

SBI Holdings will pay $270 million for about a fifth of Ajaib Group, the Jakarta investment platform, in a deal announced on Friday. The Japanese financial group presents the purchase as infrastructure for JPYSC, its yen-pegged stablecoin, in Southeast Asia. Ajaib sells equities, bonds, funds, crypto and stablecoins to Indonesian retail investors, and runs over-the-counter stablecoin settlement for institutions there. Neither side published a valuation. Three outlets supplied one anyway, by dividing.

An implied number and an undisclosed one

The Block, which put the news out at 9:32 Eastern on Friday, says the valuation was not disclosed and that Ajaib will be booked as an equity-method affiliate of SBI. CoinDesk and Forbes both carry an implied $1.35 billion, which is what $270 million for 20% works out to. An arithmetic inference and a company statement are different things, and nothing published settles which one the parties would sign. The shape of the money is unsettled too. Forbes describes a Series C, meaning fresh capital into the company; The Block describes SBI taking a stake and booking the result. We could not establish whether the $270 million is new equity, a purchase from existing holders, or a mix of both.

The stablecoin is the stated reason

JPYSC is a yen-pegged token from SBI and the developer Startale, described in earlier announcements as Japan's first yen stablecoin backed by a trust bank, with a launch set for the second quarter of 2026. Yoshitaka Kitao, SBI's chairman and president, gave the reasoning in a single line that three outlets carried in identical wording.

"In this era of tokenization, the importance of global infrastructure for digital assets is greater than ever," Kitao said.

No account says JPYSC is live in Indonesia, has a date there, or has cleared an Indonesian supervisor. No Indonesian supervisor is named at all. Japan's own machinery for this is younger than the token, since the financial regulator only opened a dedicated crypto and stablecoin division on 7 August.

Buying its way across the region

Ajaib is the third Southeast Asian position SBI has taken in three months. It bought the Singapore exchange Coinhako in July for roughly $100 million and holds a joint venture with DigiFT, a Singapore digital-securities platform. It also led a $68 million round in the stablecoin neobank Fasset. The group's digital-asset units now run to SBI VC Trade in Japan, the London market maker B2C2, JPYSC and a Layer 1 chain called Strium.

Two user counts, two denominators

Forbes puts Ajaib's user base above 7 million and names the founders, Anderson Sumarli and Yada Piyajomkwan, with DST Global and Ribbit Capital among earlier backers. That count sits in one outlet and should be read as such. The 20 million figure carried elsewhere is the number of retail investors in the Indonesian market, not Ajaib's share of them. CoinDesk sets the deal against a funding drought, with Indonesian startups raising about $340 million in 2025 and $440 million in 2024, against $9.44 billion in 2021. On how far back the record goes, the accounts differ: The Block calls this the largest Indonesian technology round since 2022, while CoinDesk and Crypto Economy say only that it is the largest in years.

The transaction was expected to complete by the end of August, which falls on Monday. No source names a closing condition, a board seat or a regulator's sign-off, and neither company has published a product plan for Indonesia. What has been announced is a price and a percentage.