Japan has not typically been the market that sets the tone for institutional crypto adoption. That role has belonged to the United States, where spot ETF approvals and the GENIUS Act reshaped the regulatory landscape in 2025, and to Europe, where MiCA created the continent-wide framework that institutions had long been waiting for.
But a new survey published this week by Nomura and its digital asset subsidiary Laser Digital suggests Japan's institutional investor base is moving in the same direction — and that the questions they are asking now are the same ones their global counterparts were asking eighteen months ago.
The 2026 Institutional Investor Survey on Digital Asset Investment Trends , conducted between December 2025 and January 2026, gathered responses from 518 investment professionals in Japan, covering institutional investors, family offices, and public-interest organisations. The findings are specific to Japan, but the patterns they reveal are not.
Improving sentiment
Thirty-one percent of respondents described their outlook on crypto assets over the next year as positive, a six-percentage-point increase from 25% in Nomura and Laser Digital's previous survey in June 2024. The share with a negative outlook fell from 23% to 18%. That leaves roughly half the respondents in a neutral position, which is itself a data point: the middle ground is larger than either the bulls or the bears, and that is where institutional adoption decisions tend to get made.
The directional shift matters more than the absolute numbers. A market moving from 25% positive to 31% positive is not a surge in enthusiasm. It is an incremental normalisation — institutions becoming slightly more comfortable with an asset class that has been around long enough, and regulated clearly enough, that outright dismissal is harder to justify.
Portfolio diversification
Sixty-five percent of respondents said they view crypto as an opportunity to diversify their portfolios, up from 62% in the prior survey. The primary reason cited for investing was diversification, with many respondents also pointing to the low correlation between crypto and other asset classes. This is the same rationale that institutional allocators in the US and Europe have used to justify initial positions — a portfolio construction argument that does not require any particular view on where crypto goes from here.
Among those already considering an investment in crypto over the next three years, 79% said they have concrete plans to do so. Of that group, 60% expect to allocate between 2% and less than 5% of their portfolios — a range consistent with what many Western allocators have described as an exploratory but meaningful position.
More Than Bitcoin
One of the more telling findings is where respondent interest is concentrated. More than 60% expressed interest in staking and mining (66%), tokenised assets (65%), lending and collateralised loans (65%), and derivatives (63%). These figures reflect an investor base that has been watching the space develop and has arrived at a more sophisticated set of questions about how to generate yield and deploy capital efficiently within it.
The stablecoin findings are similarly instructive. Sixty-three percent of respondents identified potential use cases for stablecoins, with treasury management, cross-border payments, and investment in tokenised securities among the most cited applications. Across JPY, USD, and EUR denominations, stablecoins issued by major financial institutions received the highest level of trust — a finding that aligns with the broader institutional preference for regulated, fiat-backed instruments that has driven USDC's growth globally and motivated the wave of bank-issued stablecoin announcements in 2025.
Shifting barriers
The survey does not paper over the obstacles. The main challenges respondents cited include the absence of established frameworks for fundamental analysis, counterparty risks including default and fraud, high volatility, and regulatory uncertainty. These are not new concerns — they are the standard institutional checklist, and they appear in every comparable survey conducted anywhere in the world over the past three years.
What the survey suggests is that the nature of those concerns is changing. Regulatory ambiguity has receded as the dominant concern in the jurisdictions that matter most to institutional capital. What remains is operational: how to build the risk management infrastructure, custody arrangements, and compliance frameworks needed to invest at scale. That is a more tractable problem, and it is the kind of problem that service providers, custodians, and platforms — including Laser Digital itself — exist to solve.
Japan's regulatory trajectory reinforces the direction of travel. The Financial System Council's Working Group on Crypto-asset Systems was actively developing a framework through the end of 2025, and that process is now feeding into the environment in which these institutions are making decisions.
Why this matters beyond Japan
The global institutional adoption story has moved in stages. The US led on ETF infrastructure. Europe led on regulatory codification. Japan — historically conservative, heavily regulated, and managing significant pools of long-term capital — is showing incremental but consistent movement toward allocation. The stage of the conversation Japanese institutions are having in early 2026 closely mirrors where US and European institutions were in 2024: positive sentiment building, diversification as the lead rationale, and concerns shifting from existential to operational.
When that pattern plays out across enough markets simultaneously, the aggregate effect on institutional demand becomes meaningful. The Nomura and Laser Digital survey is one data point in that larger picture, but it is a data point from a market that tends to move slowly and then all at once.
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