The Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, a giant in the Japanese financial sector, is expected to create a wallet capable of storing and making use of “digital assets powered by blockchain and NFT's”, according to the company's announcement. In addition, the company announced that it has begun suspending the operations of Global Open Network Japan, its blockchain payments platform.
The wallet is the creation of the group's part bank, the Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation. In a statement, the company said the service will be called ProgmatUT, utilizing tokens to allow users to store a variety of digital assets, including security tokens and stablecoins.
Additionally, the wallet will also use a new protocol blockchain, for the company and its partners to issue the “first asset-backed security token in Japan.” The company also cited that a secondary market will be established in 2023. The blockchain network is also scheduled to launch sometime in 2023.
We are planning to issue Japan's first trust-like stablecoin," Mitsubishi UFJ said in a statement, while also stating that it expected to have a beta version of its ProgmatUT offering ready later this year.
This project has been in development since November 2019, when Mitsubishi UFJ announced a deal with Japanese securities giants SBI and Nomura, which have been increasingly interested in cryptocurrency and blockchain-based tokenized securities offerings in recent years. The deal also included Kenedix, a Japanese real estate company.
Finally, Mitsubishi UFJ also announced that it intends to suspend the operations of Global Open Network Japan, a joint venture blockchain-based payments project with Akamai Technologies in April 2019. The network's objective was to create an open platform with data processing from high scalability in response to the rise of the internet of things (IoT), according to a company statement at the time.
It officially went live in April last year, but Mitsubishi UFJ decided to shut down less than a year later, citing sluggish transaction growth, a slowdown related to the coronavirus pandemic, low take-up and lack of integration with the IoT industry as responsible.
