WebX 2026 Adds Fidelity, Mastercard, and Swift to Tokyo

WebX 2026 has added Fidelity International, Mastercard, Ripple, Swift, and a former Federal Reserve innovation chief to its July lineup in Tokyo. The new speakers land on a roster already packed with Uniswap, Coinbase and Animoca, and arrive after Japan’s cabinet cleared a bill to reclassify crypto as a financial product under the FIEA.

The second wave of speakers puts Western asset managers, global payment networks, and Japan’s three megabanks on the same Tokyo stages with the crypto-native founders who built the space, a convergence that tracks Japan’s parallel rulebook rewrite.

WebX 2026 Adds the Incumbents

WebX 2026, organized by CoinPost and running July 13 to 14 at The Prince Park Tower Tokyo, expects over 15,000 attendees, up from last year’s 14,000-plus crowd drawn from over 90 countries. The expansion is the second wave of confirmations. Speakers announced in May included Hayden Adams, founder and CEO of Uniswap Labs, Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, John D’Agostino, head of strategy at Coinbase, and Nishint Sanghavi, head of digital currencies, Asia Pacific at Visa. The added speakers cut across the financial stack: asset management (Fidelity International, Franklin Templeton, Pantera Capital), payments (Mastercard, Visa, Ripple, Swift), exchanges and DeFi (Uniswap, Coinbase, Wintermute), and Japanese incumbents (SBI Holdings, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Mizuho Financial Group, Daiwa Securities Group, Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation).

The schedule keeps the staged feel of a Western finance roadshow. Tom Lee, chairman of Bitmine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR), holds a special keynote on July 13 at 11:25 a.m. on the CRYL Stage, plus a same-day panel at 2:15 p.m. on “Ethereum on the Balance Sheet: The New Corporate Treasury Playbook.” Hayden Adams, founder and CEO of Uniswap Labs, takes a fireside chat on July 14 at 9:10 a.m. on the C Stage. The full agenda and speaker list sit at the conference’s confirmed speakers page.

• Giselle Lai, Director, Digital Assets Strategist, APAC, Fidelity International
• Christian Rau, Senior Vice President of Digital Assets and Blockchain, Mastercard
• Fiona Murray, Vice President and Managing Director of APAC, Ripple
• Avalon Ingram, Digital Assets Business Lead, Swift
• Sunayna Tuteja, Former Chief Innovation Officer, Federal Reserve System
• Franklin Bi, General Partner, Pantera Capital
• Carole House, Former White House Advisor and CEO, Penumbra Strategies
• Chetan Karkhanis, Senior Vice President, Franklin Templeton
• David Walsh, Head of Enterprise, Ethereum Foundation
• Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director, Chairman, President & CEO, SBI Holdings

Wall Street and the Tokyo Megabanks Already Had the Seats

Even before the latest additions, the speaker list already read like a directory of finance’s senior decision makers. Mastercard sends its SVP of digital assets and blockchain, Christian Rau. J.P. Morgan sends Oliver Harris, Managing Director and Global Head of Kinexys, the bank’s blockchain unit, and the latest roster is laid out in this second-wave speaker announcement.

Visa sends Nishint Sanghavi, Head of Digital Currencies, Asia Pacific, and Franklin Templeton sends Chetan Karkhanis, SVP, plus Mitsunori Yuasa, Director of Digital and Fintech for Franklin Templeton Japan. Japanese megabanks are matching the showing. Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group sends Akio Isowa, Senior Managing Executive Officer and Group Chief Digital Innovation Officer. Mizuho Financial Group sends Nobuhiro Kaminoyama, Senior Managing Corporate Executive and Group Chief Digital Transformation Officer.

Daiwa Securities Group sends Nobuyuki Sawa, Senior Managing Director. Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking sends Akio Nishizawa, Executive Officer and General Manager.

SBI Holdings chairman Yoshitaka Kitao, also a WebX title sponsor, bridges the bank cohort and the crypto contingent, and BlackRock sends two executives, including Ken Tojo, Head of Japan ETF Product, Director at BlackRock Japan. The agenda panels then make the convergence concrete. A July 13 C-Stage panel is titled “Stablecoins Reimagined: Japan’s Three Megabanks Define the Ideal Digital Currency,” putting the three largest Japanese banks on one stage with the digital-yen debate. A separate July 13 session, “JGBs on Chain: How Blockchain Is Reshaping Japan’s Financial Infrastructure,” puts Tuteja, the former Fed innovation chief, alongside Japan’s sovereign-debt machinery.

The lineup by the numbers:

• Over 15,000 attendees expected at WebX 2026
• 14,000+ attendees at WebX 2025, drawn from over 90 countries
• More than 170 side events planned across Tokyo
• Bitmine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR), chaired by Tom Lee, trades at a $10 billion market capitalization
• Uniswap Protocol processed over $2 trillion in lifetime volume as of April 2024

Japan’s Rulebook Just Caught Up

The conference’s roster expansion arrives after a parallel shift in Tokyo’s rulebook. On April 10, 2026, Japan’s cabinet approved a bill amending the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA) to classify crypto assets as financial instruments.

The reclassification places crypto on the same regulatory footing as stocks and bonds, and is detailed in coverage of the cabinet approval of the FIEA amendment. The bill, drafted by the Financial Services Agency, was endorsed by Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama. The legislative change is expected to take effect as early as 2027, after Diet passage.

It introduces securities-style obligations into crypto: an insider trading ban, mandatory annual disclosures by issuers, a rebranding from “crypto-asset exchange operators” to “crypto-asset dealers,” and sharply higher penalties. Unlicensed operations can now draw up to ten years in prison and fines as high as ¥10 million, on par with traditional securities violations.

The change moves crypto from a payment-method framework introduced after the 2014 Mt. Gox collapse to a securities-style regime. For incumbents like Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, and J.P. Morgan, the reclassification changes the compliance math by putting crypto on the same legal architecture that already handles their Tokyo operations. For Asian crypto-native exchanges built under the old framework, it resets the licensing track and the disclosure workload. The FSA’s draft now routes crypto oversight through a securities template originally written for traditional asset managers.

Makoto Aoki, Chairman of WebX, said in a statement tied to the latest speaker additions that institutional participation in digital assets is accelerating as payment infrastructure advances and regulatory clarity deepens in major markets. The Cabinet’s April 10 vote removed the largest remaining uncertainty. The Diet is expected to take up the bill in its 2026 session, and WebX 2026’s roster additions track that timing closely.

The Yen Stablecoin Race Is Now the Main Event

The agenda’s center of gravity is a yen settlement story. Multiple July 13 sessions address yen stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and Japan’s evolving payment rails. The day’s early C-Stage panel, “Stablecoins Reimagined: Japan’s Three Megabanks Define the Ideal Digital Currency,” sets the tone. A later Binance Stage panel, “Yen Stablecoins in Practice: Payments, Remittances, and the Future of Corporate Finance,” turns it to corporate use cases.

JPYC Inc., a Japanese yen stablecoin issuer, sends its CEO, Noritaka Okabe. SBI Global Asset Management sends Tomoya Asakura, its CEO. Progmat, Inc., a tokenized-infrastructure firm that has worked with the megabanks on deposit tokens, sends Founder and CEO Tatsuya Saito. The macro context is a yen stablecoin race quietly intensifying through 2026, with the three Japanese megabanks all disclosing stablecoin and tokenized-deposit projects. The FIEA reclassification gives those efforts a clearer legal lane, and Ripple’s presence on the WebX roster is mirrored by Ripple’s H1 2026 institutional partnership stack, which spans banking, custody, stablecoins, and MiCA licensing across more than a dozen deals.

WebX’s role is to give the project teams a common stage in front of regulators. Ju Chun Ko, a legislator in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, and Bilal Bin Saqib, State Minister for Crypto and Blockchain and CEO of the Pakistan Crypto Council, are both on the roster. The agenda runs from stablecoin sessions to tokenized securities to AI-and-digital-asset discussions.

The Cost of the New Headliners

For the institutions arriving, the timing fits their playbook. Tokyo is a major Asian financial center with the legal clarity to deploy crypto products, sign bank partnerships, and recruit local talent in one trip. The conference’s 170-plus side events across the city, a format carried over from last year’s run, give the institutional cohort dozens of closed-door rooms to operate in. The cost of admission is a senior executive’s time, which the conference lets one trip cover.

For the original crypto-native cohort, the math is less clean. Many of the projects on stage this year were built on the premise that crypto would route around the existing financial system, a pitch that lands differently when the people who run that system are sharing the same panel. The shift also remakes who controls the regulatory conversation: the FSA now writes crypto rules inside a securities template originally drafted for traditional asset managers. The price of admission to the mainstream is conformity to a rulebook the pioneers did not write. The space retains one native advantage: it ships open-source software, runs public infrastructure, and builds on rails no incumbent owns.

Frequently Asked Questions

When and where is WebX 2026?

WebX 2026 runs July 13-14, 2026, at The Prince Park Tower Tokyo. The organizer, CoinPost, expects over 15,000 attendees, up from 14,000-plus at the 2025 edition, which drew visitors from over 90 countries.

Who are the new speakers added to WebX 2026?

The second wave added Fidelity International’s Giselle Lai, Mastercard’s Christian Rau, Ripple’s Fiona Murray, Swift’s Avalon Ingram, former Federal Reserve Chief Innovation Officer Sunayna Tuteja, Pantera Capital’s Franklin Bi, Franklin Templeton’s Chetan Karkhanis, Ethereum Foundation’s David Walsh, SBI Holdings’ Yoshitaka Kitao, former White House advisor Carole House, and Takafumi Horie. They join the May-announced roster that already included Uniswap’s Hayden Adams and Coinbase’s John D’Agostino.

Why are major banks and payment networks sending senior executives?

Japan’s cabinet approved a bill on April 10, 2026, to reclassify crypto as a financial instrument under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA). The reclassification is expected to take effect as early as 2027, after Diet passage, and is drawing the same Western asset managers and Japanese megabanks that already operate in Tokyo’s regulated capital markets.

What is the conference’s main theme this year?

“Beyond the Screen, Connecting the Nodes,” CoinPost said. The agenda ties together stablecoins, tokenized capital markets, AI and digital assets, and the regulatory frameworks shaping institutional adoption across Asia.

How can readers attend or follow WebX 2026?

Registration, the full agenda, and the speaker list are posted at webx-asia.com. CoinPost plans more than 170 side events across Tokyo during the conference window, a format carried over from the 2025 edition.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrency assets carry substantial risk, including total loss of principal, and readers should consult a qualified financial professional before making any decisions. Figures are accurate as of publication on June 30, 2026.