SBI Group Takes Over TaoTao Exchange After Getting Rid Of Binance

The SBI Group takes over the TaoTao exchange after it finished negotiating with Binance as reported previously in our Binance news.

One of Japan’s biggest financial companies is making a move into the domestic market by taking over the TaoTao exchange from Yahoo Japan. The size of the deal is of course, not disclosed but TaoTao or BitARG (the name of the exchange before  Yahoo got involved) confirmed in a press release that the SBI acquired all of Yahoo Japan operator Z Holdings’ shares while the media reports claimed that TaoTao became an official SBI subsidiary.

In the press release, TaoTao explained how SBI Group takes over and the change in shareholders with Yahoo Japan’s shares. The company continued to say that they formed a partnership with the SBILM subsidiary which is a newly launched branch from the financial giant that is set to use the R3 blockchain consortium that is developed to power the foreign exchange solutions. Earlier this week the exchange announced that it ended talks with binance on their strategic partnership discussions which was a deal that could have allowed Binance back on the Japanese market.

SBI operates a crypto exchange in Japan already, the SBI VC Trade as well as a crypto mining subsidiary named SBI crypto. The bank runs the SBI-Ripple Asia blockchain network along with the San-Francisco based company Ripple. Yahoo Japan is the leading search engine in the country, all while being backed by SoftBank which owns 48% stakes in the company. Yahoo Japan is also set to merge with Line which is a branch of South Korea’s internet giant Naver.

This was also a very interesting week for SBI as well. As reported, the SBI group will now join forces with a Swiss cryptobank in order to create the $66.3 million unlisted stocks fund for promising crypto and blockchain companies in Southeast Asia and Europe. Over the summer, the Japanese financial giant made a $30 million stake in a UK-based crypto liquidity company. It’s safe to say that SBI is not afraid of crypto and clearly sees its potential while making plenty of partnerships with prominent crypto companies and smaller crypto startups.