Calling off entry into crypto exchange and withdrawing the registration (2019)

A business turned back after thirteen months

From the decision to enter in March 2018 to the halt in April 2019, this venture consumed thirteen months. The company had installed as its president a man who had spent more than twenty years at the Bank of Japan and the Financial Services Agency, joined the industry association, and finished internal testing before stopping. It did not stop because the preparation was poor; it stopped, one suspects, precisely because the preparation was complete enough to make plain that every remaining obstacle lay on the side of the market and the regulator.

The $563,205 (¥61m) taken as a business-restructuring loss is small beside the $22.4M (¥2bn) operating loss of the same year. That smallness is itself the mark of a withdrawal line drawn in advance and actually honoured. In May 2020 the revised Payment Services Act renamed virtual currency “crypto assets” in law, raising the bar for entry further. On the road that carried Money Forward to ¥50.3bn of revenue in the year to November 2025, there is no exchange on the signboard.