Mitsui & Co.’s Crypto Arm Brings Tokenized Metals Asset Zipangcoin to OP Mainnet – Crypto News – Crypto News
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Mitsui & Co.'s Crypto Arm Brings Tokenized Metals Asset Zipangcoin to OP Mainnet Mitsui & Co.'s Crypto Arm Brings Tokenized Metals Asset Zipangcoin to OP Mainnet

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Mitsui & Co.’s Crypto Arm Brings Tokenized Metals Asset Zipangcoin to OP Mainnet – Crypto News

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The shift to Optimism is ZPG’s first deployment on a public blockchain since launching in 2022, and the start of its global rollout.

Mitsui & Co. Digital Commodities (MDC), a subsidiary of Japanese trading giant Mitsui & Co., Ltd., is launching its tokenized gold, silver, and platinum asset, Zipangcoin (ZPG), on Optimism’s Ethereum Layer 2, OP Mainnet, according to a press release shared with The Defiant.

ZPG has been issued under Japan’s regulatory framework since 2022 and currently runs on Miyabi, a proprietary private blockchain developed by longtime Japanese centralized crypto exchange bitFlyer.

The OP Mainnet deployment marks the first time the asset will be issued in a public blockchain ecosystem. Per the release, Japanese CEX GMO Coin will list ZPG for trading on April 20.

MDC’s parent, Mitsui & Co., is a Fortune Global 500 conglomerate with a market cap of over $105 billion. Berkshire Hathaway is its largest shareholder, the release notes.

MDC also stated in the release that the choice of OP Mainnet follows deliberate due diligence, highlighting that OP Stack chains processed over 6 billion transactions in 2025 — 29x growth in two years.

“A different category of asset is arriving: DeFi protocols, consumer fintech, and now regulated financial instruments backed by physical assets from institutions that have operated in global commodity markets for over a century,” the release reads.

According to DefiLlama data, OP Mainnet currently has a total value locked in DeFi of over $393 million, making it the 17th largest chain in DeFi by TVL. The chain’s stablecoin market cap is approaching $579 million, and its $30-day DEX volume is over $623 million.

Sho Miichi, MDC’s representative director & president, was quoted in the release saying: “We are pleased to partner with Optimism to bring a high-quality, commodity-linked digital asset from Japan to investors worldwide.”

Kyle Jenke, chief business officer at OP Labs, described Japan’s regulatory clarity as “one of the most compelling markets for on-chain finance,” adding:

“Zipangcoin is a commodity-backed cryptoasset issued by Mitsui & Co. Digital Commodities and will be the first cryptoasset issued by a Japanese company to launch on OP Mainnet.”

The ZPG launch on Optimism fits into a broader wave of institutional-grade assets moving on-chain.

On-chain tokenized RWAs tripled to roughly $18.6 billion over the course of 2025, with analysts projecting the market could reach $2 trillion by 2030.

A joint report this month from Keyrock and Securitize projected that the distributed tokenized RWA market — referring to tokenized assets on public chains that are freely transferable — as a base case will grow from today’s nearly $30 billion to $400 billion by 2030.

Earlier this year, ether.fi migrated its crypto neobank — with $5.7 billion in TVL and around 50,000 active cards — from Scroll to OP Mainnet to access enterprise-grade payment infrastructure.

Tokenized precious metals trading has surged in recent months across both centralized and decentralized platforms. Securitize and Keyrock’s April report fournd that RWA perpetuals tied to commodities like gold, silver and oil, grew 40x in six months.

Earlier this week, decentralized perpetual exchange GMX launched 24/7 gold and silver markets on L2 Arbitrum, recording more than $10 million in trades on the first day.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

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