Japan has not typically been the market that sets the tone for institutional crypto adoption. That role has belonged to the United States, where spot ETF approvals and the GENIUS Act reshaped the regulatory landscape in 2025, and to Europe, where MiCA created the continent-wide framework that institutions had long been waiting for.

But a new survey published this week by Nomura and its digital asset subsidiary Laser Digital suggests Japan’s institutional investor base is moving in the same direction — and that the questions they are asking now are the same ones their global counterparts were asking eighteen months ago.

The 2026 Institutional Investor Survey on Digital Asset Investment Trends, conducted between December 2025 and…