MUFG filed Japan’s first bank security-token bond plan

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group filed an amended registration statement on October 9, 2025 for a ¥10 billion unsecured subordinated bond represented and administered as a security token. MUFG said the public offering would be its first security-token bond and was expected to be the first such issuance from Japan’s banking sector.

The development mattered because the proposed instrument was not a cryptocurrency or a lightly regulated token sale. It was conventional bank debt, designed to qualify as Tier 2 regulatory capital under the Basel III framework, with its ownership and transfers recorded through distributed-ledger infrastructure. That combination made the filing a concrete test of whether tokenization could enter a systemically important bank’s ordinary capital-management machinery.

The terms disclosed on October 9

The Financial Services Agency’s EDINET record specified an aggregate principal amount of ¥10 billion, divided into ¥1 million denominations and offered at par. The domestic subscription period was scheduled for October 20 through November 7, 2025, with payment planned for November 11.

The bond was scheduled to mature on January 11, 2036. MUFG could redeem the entire outstanding issue on January 11, 2031, subject to confirmation from Japan’s Financial Services Agency. For the period beginning after November 11, 2025 and ending January 11, 2031, the filing provided an indicative annual coupon range of 1.550% to 2.150%, not a final rate. After that date, the proposed floating rate would reference the five-year Japanese government bond yield plus an initially indicated spread of 0.300 to 0.900 percentage points.

Those figures described proposed offering terms as of October 9, not a completed sale. Investor demand, the final coupon and actual issuance remained unresolved on the event date.

A permissioned ledger, not an open network

The filing said acquisition and transfer records would use Progmat, a security-token issuance and management platform built on Corda. Its distributed ledger was described as private or consortium-based, unlike public networks such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Investors would not directly control Progmat accounts or private keys. Applications would pass through a financial-instruments firm, while Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking would act as custodian and bond-register administrator. Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities would handle the offering and create the information required to record transfers.

That structure placed the ledger inside established intermediary relationships rather than removing intermediaries. Tokenization changed how ownership data was maintained and transferred; it did not eliminate securities regulation, identity checks, custody or the issuer’s legal register.

Why the structure was significant

MUFG’s plan moved tokenized securities beyond experiments involving collectible assets or small corporate issues. The proposed token represented subordinated bank funding and carried the loss-absorption features associated with Tier 2 capital. The filing warned that principal and interest could be written off following a specified non-viability determination and that subordinated creditors ranked behind general obligations.

The instrument also had transfer restrictions and platform dependencies. The filing identified possible delays, cybersecurity failures, private-key misuse and divergence between ledger data and legally effective ownership records. These disclosures limited any claim that distributed ledgers automatically made the bond more liquid, safer or continuously tradable.

The verified conclusion on October 9, 2025 was therefore narrow but important: a major regulated banking group had formally advanced a public, blockchain-recorded subordinated bond through Japan’s securities-filing process. Completion, regulatory-capital treatment in practice and secondary-market performance still required subsequent evidence.