Japan DeFi Alliance, or JDA, has been established today to increase the awareness and understanding of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) in Japan. The organization consists of a number of Japanese blockchain companies, including Techtec, HashHub, Fintertech, Stake Technologies, Soramitsu, FRAME00, and Fracton Ventures. Top DeFi projects such as Maker Foundation and Kyber Network are also among its members.
Objectives and Activities
DeFi, built on blockchain, is still in its infancy. The group recognizes the need for a leading organization that can advocate and foster the growth of DeFi in Japan amid the rising expectation for DeFi to revolutionize the financial industry going forward.
JDA recognizes the importance of sharing the knowledge of DeFi with regulators, ensuring they have an accurate understanding of DeFi in order to make decisions that encourage innovation while meeting their regulatory goals. JDA will take the lead in advocating the use of blockchain in the financial industry.
JDA will mainly carry out the following activities:
Knowledge sharing: JDA aims to improve the understanding of DeFi by providing opportunities for knowledge sharing. Specifically, we will hold seminars and conferences and invite overseas speakers for study sessions.
Business Matching: JDA will proactively conduct business matching to create synergies among its members. It will also support Japanese entrepreneurs seeking to launch their business in DeFi.
Policy Recommendations: The future of DeFi, which could revolutionize the financial industry, will be impacted by appropriate regulations. We will update other countries' regulatory developments and make recommendations to contribute to the rule-setting process.
Next Step
We will be conducting a variety of activities to support the development of DeFi in Japan. We believe it is important to increase the number of case studies first, and for this purpose, we invite companies and organizations to join JDA.
By participating in the JDA, you will learn about DeFi. In addition, JDA provides its members with opportunities to build the network needed to succeed in this digital transformation age. We will start accepting applications for participation as of today, so if you are interested in joining, please register at the JDA website below.
JDA website is here：https://jda-defi.org/
We look forward to collaborating with companies and organizations from various industries to advocate for the development of DeFi in Japan. Please contact us if you are interested in working with us to organize events and exchange information.
Founding Members and Comments
JDA was founded by the leading blockchain companies and projects in Japan and the rest of the world.
Techtec
Techtec is a Web3 company that utilizes blockchain in the education and finance industries. By recording the learning data generated by PoL, our online learning service, on the blockchain, students can manage their own learning history (called “Learning Score”) in a way that is difficult to tamper with. By connecting Learning Score to DeFi, we aim to realize a future society where people have more choices the more they learn.
CEO / Tomohiro Tagami
“DeFi is one of the major innovations representing Web3 made possible by blockchain. I would like to thank all the founding members who have supported this action. I am also excited to be able to build the society of the future together. As the founder of JDA, I will contribute to the realization of an open and flat society. JDA is looking for more members to join us in promoting DeFi.”
Maker Foundation
MakerDAO enables the generation of Dai, the world’s first unbiased cryptocurrency and leading decentralized stablecoin. Dai mitigates volatility through an autonomous system of smart contracts called the Maker Protocol, as well as through decentralized community governance. Maker Foundation is part of the MakerDAO community.
Japan Lead / Kathleen Chu
“Decentralized finance is the new generation of finance that improves an individual’s accessibility to the global financial markets using software codes. MakerDAO, a leader in DeFi, is a decentralized community dedicated to bringing economic stability and transparency to the world economy. As part of that, we at the Maker Foundation are committed to educating and sharing knowledge about MakerDAO and DeFi and appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the understanding of DeFi in Japan.”
Kyber Network
Kyber Network is a fully on-chain liquidity protocol for seamless token swaps on DeFi.
Japan Marketing Head / Taisuke Horitsugi
“DeFi movement is gathering momentum all over the world. However, it has been hard for developers to join the DeFi space in Japan because of a lack of information and uncertainties about regulations. I believe JDA with expert knowledge can contribute to DeFi development and utilization in Japan by providing both the government and companies with accurate information and advice.”
HashHub
About HashHub: Founded in April 2018. We Build Choice" to create choices based on a new context. As a comprehensive blockchain company, HashHub provides financial services such as HashHub Lending, blockchain industry research reports, and blockchain-related development support for domestic clients. HashHub also operates a co-working space for domestic and international blockchain startups and developers based in the area around the University of Tokyo.
Company name: HashHub Inc.
Location: Hongo Shintoku Building 7F, 3-38-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo
Website: https://hashhub.tokyo/
Inquiries regarding this matter: lending@hashhub.tokyo
Co-Founder CEO / Junya Hirano
“For people in the early Meiji era, joint-stock companies, banks, and stock markets were all new concepts. Our predecessors faced these new concepts and created the industrial infrastructure that supports our lives today. For people live in today, public blockchain and financial liquidity in a permissionless network is whole new concepts. We believe those will be the next industrial infrastructure. I hope that the establishment of JDA will be a step to connect this new concept to society.”
Fintertech
Fintertech is a joint venture of Daiwa Securities Group Inc. and Credit Saison. We are aiming to create new financial services with cutting-edge technology and external collaboration, based on on the know-how of securities and financial business that Daiwa Securities Group and Credit Saison have cultivated since their founding. Currently, we provide the "Digital Asset Collateral Loan", which is the only cryptocurrency backed loan in Japan,and the "KASSAI", which is an online Tipping SaaS.
CEO / Makoto Takeda
“Decentralized finance has great potential to be a Game Changer that impacts on current financial services with low scalability and flexibility. On the other hand ,there are still many issues that need to be discussed in the future, such as regulations and AML/KYC. The biggest challenge is understanding of DeFi services, known as Money Legos named after its increasing complexity . We believe that providing professional and appropriate information is the key to the utilization and development of DeFi in Japan. We appreciate having this opportunity to participate in those activities.”
Stake Technologies
Stake Technologies is leading the development of Plasm Network, a leading dApps hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum and Layer2 solutions like ZK Rollups. Plasm Network is a public blockchain that successfully connected to Polkadot’s testnet as the first parachain. The company aims to make a human centric web3.0 that makes the existing web2.0 obsolete.
CEO / Sota Watanabe
“DeFi is the most prominent use case on public blockchains. We are excited to be a part of this big movement and lead the trend here in Japan. We are committed to pushing the Japanese DeFi ecosystem to the next stage.”
Soramitsu
SORAMITSU is a global technology company delivering blockchain-based solutions for enterprises, universities, and governments. We have developed and contributed a blockchain platform Hyperledger Iroha to the open source project, Hyperledger Project, hosted by the Linux Foundation. In addition, the world's first central bank digital currency payment system, Bakong, which was jointly developed with the National Bank of Cambodia, is available for use in Cambodia.
CFO / Katsuhiro Otake
“DeFi is the central embodiment of application for the founding spirit of blockchain technology. Since the beginning, Soramitsu has been working to realize and innovate DeFi, which are starting to materialized in the real-world. We are committed to establishing more use cases and contribute to the progress of this field.”
FRAME00
Dev Protocol is a unique decentralized protocol made in Japan that rewards both creators and supporters through staking, and realizes the world's first sustainable incentive model. In the OSS community, where people felt difficulty in monetization and had no choice but to rely on goodwill donations, many OSS developers from all over the world have succeeded in monetizing their projects by using Dev Protocol.
CEO / Mayumi Hara、CTO / Aggre
“Decentralized finance is the new financial system that brings economic freedom to the innovations happening in the open source world, and has great potential to rapidly accelerate collaboration. FRAME00 is a founding company of Dev Protocol, an on-chain middleware, and plans to go DAO in the near future.”
Fracton Ventures
Fracton Ventures is a company who is working together with protocols and projects to create the future of Web 3.0 not just as supporters but also as active contributors.
Striving to enable the global ecosystem towards the realization of a Web 3.0 society, they are also designing tokens to foster sustainable and open protocols and services.
Co-Founder / Yudai Suzuki
“We're very pleased to commit ourselves towards developing and working with the DeFi ecosystem in Japan. Not only are we committed to the technology side of DeFi, we want to contribute to growing the Web3.0 and DAO ecosystem that will drive and support DeFi.”
Japan DeFi Alliance（JDA）
Name ：Japan DeFi Alliance
Co-Founder ：Techtec CEO Tomohiro Tagami
Contact
Japan DeFi Alliance Executive Office
Email：info@techtec.co.jp