REGULATORY INSIGHT
Crypto-assets move under Japan's FIEA — insider trading rules are coming
On 15 July 2026, the Act partially amending the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act and the Payment Services Act was enacted in Japan. The centre of gravity for crypto-asset regulation moves from the Payment Services Act to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA).
The move itself had been signalled well in advance. What is new for practice is that insider trading rules are being introduced for crypto-assets. The FIEA as it stands has no provision regulating insider trading in crypto-assets directly.
What changes
On the Financial Services Agency's account, the transfer reflects the fact that crypto-assets are now widely treated as investments both in Japan and abroad. The same Act also introduces disclosure and assurance for sustainability information, measures to improve the supply of capital to start-ups, and a strengthening of the rules against unfair trading.
For crypto-assets, two points bear directly on day-to-day practice.
- Insider trading rules. Building on the framework that applies to listed securities, a person in a special position with access to material facts about a covered crypto-asset is prohibited from dealing in it before those facts are made public.
- A disclosure regime. A move to a framework under which the information needed for an investment decision is provided.
How wide is “a position with access to material facts”
For securities, the categories — company insiders, recipients of information — are settled, and practice has decades of accumulated understanding behind it. For crypto-assets the outline of that “position” is not yet as clear.
The exchange staff who decide on a listing. The issuer's development team. A validator who learns of a significant change to the network before anyone else. Do these all sit inside the same rule?
With crypto-assets, information capable of being material does not originate only inside an organisation. A protocol change, the discovery of a vulnerability, a decision to list or delist, movement by a large holder. Because the sources are distributed, it is harder to establish who came into contact with what, and when.
“We did not know” stops being an answer
Under insider trading rules, who inside the business touched which information, and when, becomes something you are asked about after the fact. In the securities world, pre-clearance of trades, information barriers and closed periods have grown up to manage exactly this.
Most businesses handling crypto-assets have not been built around that kind of routine. For exchange operators, issuers and the service providers around them alike, a new problem appears: how to know about, and how to record, employees' personal dealing.
The hardest case is an employee holding, personally, a crypto-asset the business itself handles. With securities you can see it through the account. Crypto-assets can be held in a self-custodied wallet. The route by which you would come to know is simply different.
Worth checking now
- Whether you have listed the roles in your business that come into contact with information capable of moving the price of a crypto-asset.
- Whether you have a way of recording when such information arose internally and when it was made public.
- Whether there is any framework for notification or restriction covering employees' own crypto-asset dealing.
- Whether you know the extent to which outside contractors and joint development partners come into contact with material facts.
- Whether internal rules written for the Payment Services Act framework still hold under the FIEA framework.
Part of the commencement date is left to Cabinet Order. The period between enactment and commencement is the time you have to rearrange the organisation. Even if you import practice that is established on the securities side, it has to be designed around what is particular to crypto-assets.
Carry it by hand, or build it in
Having someone record who touched which information, and when, will work as a routine. But where the sources of information are distributed and people outside the business are involved, you cannot afterwards establish where a gap in the record appeared.
We research and develop technology that carries conformity with regulation as a mechanism rather than as manual routine, and we hold the results as patent applications. We have filed in this area as well.
Which parts of your business the new rules reach, and how the organisation should be rearranged around them. This is a good question to bring us before you have answered it — working out whether it applies is our job, not yours.
Get in touchSources
Financial Services Agency, “Bills submitted to the Diet” — Act partially amending the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act and the Payment Services Act (221st Diet session, submitted 10 April 2026, enacted 15 July 2026)
https://www.fsa.go.jp/common/diet/index.html
The outline of the bill, the explanatory material, the summary and the comparative table of old and new provisions are reachable from that page.
This note reflects publicly available material as of 22 August 2026 and is not legal advice. The commencement date, the range of crypto-assets covered, the definition of material facts and other details should be confirmed against the text of the Act and the Cabinet Orders and Cabinet Office Ordinances still to be made. Please consult a qualified adviser on the application to your own circumstances.
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