# Announcing Coincheck > Coincheck Group and DFNS sign a strategic partnership to bring institutional-grade digital asset custody to Japan. - Author: Felix Eigelshoven (Head of APAC) - Published: 2026-09-01 - Category: Update - Canonical: https://dfns.co/article/announcing-coincheck/ - All DFNS articles: https://dfns.co/llms-full.txt --- The line between exchange, broker, custodian, and bank is dissolving. The platforms that defined the first decade of crypto trading are becoming financial institutions in their own right, offering custody, prime brokerage, asset management, and B2B2C distribution to banks. The operating layer beneath them is what makes that possible, and what determines whether an exchange can credibly extend itself into institutional, regulated, multi-jurisdictional finance. Today, we are proud to announce that Coincheck Group and DFNS have signed a strategic partnership focused on digital asset wallet technology and custody services in Japan. This partnership places one of Japan's most trusted retail crypto platforms, publicly listed on NASDAQ and actively building a global institutional footprint, on top of one of the most battle-tested digital asset platforms in the industry. It marks an important milestone in Coincheck's transformation from a domestic exchange into a multi-market digital asset group. "Coincheck Group has forged trust with Japanese retail customers over the last decade and extending that into institutional services requires building a different class of custody infrastructure," said Pascal St-Jean, CEO of Coincheck Group. "DFNS's wallet technology and institutional expertise enhance our existing capabilities." ## Coincheck is one of Asia's most established crypto platforms Coincheck is one of Japan's leading crypto asset exchanges, operated by Coincheck, Inc. and held within Coincheck Group N.V. (NASDAQ: CNCK), a Dutch public limited liability company providing digital asset trade execution, custody, staking, and asset management services. Founded in Tokyo in 2014, Coincheck has ranked No. 1 in crypto trading app downloads in Japan for 7 consecutive years, from 2019 through 2025. As of mid-2025, it manages more than JPY 1 trillion in customer assets and accounts for nearly a third of trading volume among JVCEA members, the self-regulatory body that oversees Japan's licensed exchanges. It is fully regulated by Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA), and held the leading position in domestic Bitcoin spot trading volume in the second half of 2024. For Japanese retail investors, Coincheck has long been the default on-ramp into crypto: a simple, regulated, high-trust interface to one of the most rigorously supervised markets in the world. The platform's strength has always been the combination of regulatory standing, brand trust, ease of use, and the operational discipline that comes from working inside the Japanese financial system. But what makes Coincheck particularly significant in 2026 is the trajectory of the group. Through 2025 and early 2026, it has executed 3 acquisitions that reposition it as a global institutional digital asset platform: * The March 2025 acquisition of Next Finance Tech, a staking platform services company, adding yield infrastructure to the group. * The October 2025 acquisition of Aplo SAS, a Paris-based crypto prime brokerage for institutional investors, registered as a DASP with France's AMF and pursuing licensing under MiCA. This was Coincheck's first acquisition outside Japan and its first regulated foothold in Europe. * The March 2026 acquisition of 3iQ, a global pioneer in digital asset investment products with operations across multiple jurisdictions. Together, these three deals signal something larger than expansion. Coincheck is building the infrastructure to serve institutional clients globally, to offer B2B2C services to banks seeking to provide crypto exposure to their customers, and to participate directly in the next layer of regulated digital finance. ## DFNS is the core banking platform for digital assets Since 2020, DFNS has given banks, fintechs, and enterprises the infrastructure to issue, move, and govern money onchain the way a traditional core banking system underpins accounts, payments, and ledgers in conventional finance. The platform brings together wallet-as-a-service, key management, node management, transaction processing, treasury management, tokenization, policy, governance, workflow orchestration, and compliance into one control plane, with connectivity to 100+ blockchains and third-party services. Today, DFNS is trusted by over 500 institutions and fintechs, including Standard Chartered Bank, IBM, Broadridge, Apex Group, Stripe, Circle, PhotonPay, Postfinance, and more. Architecturally, the platform is organized around multiple core services: * Wallet-as-a-Service provides programmable wallet management across 100+ blockchain networks and third-party integrations, purpose-built for institutional-scale digital asset operations. * Tokenization, Transaction, and Treasury Management orchestrate the full transaction lifecycle across all supported networks, with deterministic nonce management, compliance integration, end-to-end visibility, and multiple treasury allocation options. * Workflows, Policy and Governance Engines enforce who and what can access, approve, and control wallets and transactions, with granular governance, secure authentication, multi-approval workflows, and programmable policies. * Key Management delivers MPC-, TEE- and/or HSM-based key generation, distribution, and signing, with native key import and export APIs so institutions retain full ownership and portability of their signing material. For a group like Coincheck, with retail trading at scale in Japan, institutional prime brokerage in Europe, and asset management across multiple jurisdictions, two characteristics of the platform matter especially. 1. The first is deployment flexibility. DFNS operates across SaaS, hybrid, and on-premises configurations, with native support for HSM partners including Thales, IBM, AWS CloudHSM, and Intel SGX/TDX, and key custody models spanning MPC, HSM, TEE, and BYOK. For a group operating across the FSA, the AMF, MiCA, and other regulatory regimes that increasingly demand jurisdictional control over key material, this flexibility is not a feature. It is a precondition for being able to operate at all. 2. The second is chain coverage breadth. Coincheck operates across the full landscape of relevant networks, from the major chains where institutional flows concentrate to the emerging permissioned and tokenization-focused networks where the next generation of financial products will settle. DFNS supports all of them: Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, Base, Polygon, BNB Chain, Stellar, Tron, Hedera, and many more, alongside institutional networks like Canton, Flow, and Concordium, with new chains continuously added as the market evolves. This depth of coverage is matched by a security posture among the most rigorous in the industry. DFNS holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, 27017, and 27018 certifications, audited by KPMG, with continuous third-party penetration testing. It has maintained zero security breaches since inception. For Coincheck, a group whose own history includes one of the most consequential security incidents in the industry's first decade, and whose subsequent reconstruction has been defined by an uncompromising commitment to security, regulatory compliance, and operational discipline, the choice of infrastructure was never going to be casual. DFNS's combination of programmability, chain coverage, security certifications, deployment flexibility, and institutional pedigree made it the right foundation to build on. ## Built for Japan's institutional custody bar Japan has established one of the world's leading regulatory frameworks for digital assets, with trust banks playing a central role in the institutional custody landscape. As demand from Japanese financial institutions for compliant, secure, institutional-grade digital asset services continues to grow, the Coincheck and DFNS collaboration intends to deliver custody infrastructure aligned with the requirements of financial institutions within the Japanese market. DFNS and Coincheck Group plan to collaborate on the deployment of DFNS's technology to support Coincheck, Inc., intended to enable the development of secure, institutional-grade custody for Japanese financial institutions, compliant with regulatory requirements and the execution of definitive agreements. "Japan represents one of the most sophisticated and well-regulated digital asset markets in the world, and its trust banks set a high bar for institutional custody globally," said Clarisse Hagège, CEO of DFNS. "We are pleased to work alongside Coincheck Group as it extends its leadership into institutional services and to bring our wallet infrastructure to the Japanese market." ## What this partnership signals The partnership between Coincheck and DFNS reflects something broader about where this industry is heading. The platforms that will define the next decade of digital finance are not pure-play exchanges, not pure-play custodians, not pure-play brokers, and not pure-play stablecoin issuers. They are integrated groups operating across multiple regulated jurisdictions, multiple asset classes, and multiple client segments, increasingly across both retail and institutional markets. They are extending themselves up the value chain, into prime brokerage, asset management, tokenization, and bank-grade B2B2C distribution. The infrastructure that supports them has to keep up. It has to be programmable enough to express the institutional logic these groups need, secure enough to clear the audits their regulators demand, broad enough to cover every chain their business touches, and flexible enough to deploy under whatever jurisdictional constraints each market imposes. This is why we built DFNS the way we did. And it is why we are particularly proud to be the platform underneath Coincheck's next chapter. * Learn more about Coincheck: [coincheck.com](https://coincheck.com/) * Get started on DFNS: [app.dfns.io](https://app.dfns.io/)