Japan’s GameFi community raises liquidity concerns with lawmaker

The Japanese blockchain gaming community approached the Liberal Democratic Party (JDP) seeking help to improve liquidity in Japan’s crypto asset market.

On Feb. 21, Ryo Matsubara, director of Oasys, a GameFi blockchain, visited the LDP’s digital society promotion headquarters on behalf of Japanese blockchain gaming projects to discuss the current landscape.

Matsubara acknowledged that the recently implemented taxation laws and the LPS Act promote ease of doing business for startups. However, he raised concerns about strict regulations that have dried up liquidity in Japan, which directly harms the growth of the GameFi ecosystem.

Make Japanese Web 3 market more liquid.

As the issue of corporate unrealized gain taxation and
LPS Act has been resolved, we can launch web 3 startups from Japan.
The next step is to improve liquidity in order to create an environment for growth.

I made presentation to… https://t.co/nj5tGxaEna

— Ryo Matsubara_EN (@RyoMatsubara3) February 21, 2024

Regulations that incentivize users to safely invest in cryptocurrencies and the blockchain economy can see an immediate growth in liquidity with the influx of more buyers and sellers. Oasys plans to continue collaborating with the government to ensure the global competitiveness of the Japanese Web3 market. Matsubara believes in Japan’s potential to reclaim its iconic gaming history on Web3:

“If Japan recovers its liquidity, it will be the hottest market as we have a lot of attractive content.”

While Japan was initially highly skeptical about crypto adoption, it has recently eased its stance toward the technology.

Related: Japan opens up Web3 investments for local VCs

In September 2023, the Japanese government reportedly began planning to allow startups to raise public funds via crypto asset issuance. At the time, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida reaffirmed the country’s commitment to fostering the Web3 industry. He also highlighted its potential to transform the internet and kindle social change.

More recently, the Financial Services Agency (FSA) — Japan’s principal financial regulator — suggested several measures to protect users from “unlawful transfers” to crypto exchanges , and one might seriously complicate the peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions market.

The FSA and the National Police Agency (NPA) encouraged banks to protect users by referring to several key initiatives, which includes:

“Stopping transfers to crypto-asset exchange service providers if the sender’s name is different from the account name.”

The Japanese version of the press release explains that the suspension of crypto transfers with mismatched names should be extended to both individual and corporate accounts.

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