As North America celebrates a long weekend, markets are quiet, but both Bitcoin and Ether are maintaining price stability. Bitcoin is opening the trading week in Asia above $30K at $30,654, according to market data, while Ether is at $1,938. CoinDesk Indices Bitcoin Trend Indicator is showing that the world’s largest digital asset is going through a significant uptrend period. Despite the week opening with a holiday, this week will see some major economic events, with the June FOMC minutes being published on Wednesday – which will give more insight into how the Fed will next move on interest rates – JOLTs Job openings on Thursday, and new unemployment numbers on Friday.
Explore the Japanese internet and you’ll find that it looks a bit ancient. You can do many more things online in Japan than you could in the West, but there are a few notable exceptions, and overall the country’s Web2 space feels a decade out of date. The government really felt that we totally missed Web2…So now they see Web3 as something Japan could potentially embrace and create the new generation of Japanese tech companies and tech visionaries in this space, said Akio Tanaka, a founding partner of IVC.
Much has been written about Japan’s regulatory successes in these early days of Web3. Unlike the United States, which is in open hostility to the industry, Japan seems to embrace it and has worked to regulate it – regulations that were born in blood after the collapse of Mt. Gox in 2013. And, in the end, Japan was the safest place to be an FTX customer.
But what does the celebration of Web3 look like in Japan? A lot like it did at the height of the bull market in the West. NFTs and GameFi are big, and curiously, so is enterprise blockchain. Some of Japan’s largest companies are announcing that they have a Web3 strategy, and lots of money is being thrown around, but these strategies are still ambiguous and on the drawing boards.
Japanese GameFi developers, for instance, want to serve gamers, not crypto speculators, said Tanaka. They will probably not try to create the same kind of speculative move that you may have seen outside of Japan, because they realize that can actually backfire and negatively impact their core game fans.
Despite all the talk of GameFi and NFTs at the show, Japan’s best-known IP is staying well away from it, aside from Square’s experiment. Nintendo was looking to hire an NFT and metaverse expert in March, but nothing has materialized. Even the Japanese Prime Minister’s speech which opened the conference, didn’t mention Web3 by name.
But there is something there, even if it’s not what the evangelists say it is. As the interview with Tanaka wound to a close, the next group, a corporate delegation from Sega, arrived early. Sega, an investor in IVC, has recently been in the news dismissing rumors that it plans to be acquired. A spokesperson for IVC declined to comment as to what the meeting was about, but it probably involved crypto.
Is Japan really racing toward the future of crypto? Or is it stuck a few years in the past? It’s hard to say, but one thing is certain: Japan’s embrace of Web3 is not quite what the bulls say it is.