SBI Crypto Investment invests in Breadwinner BRD wallet

SBI Crypto Investment, a Subsidiary of one of Japan’s largest financial institutions, SBI Holdings recently invested in Breadwinner AG, a cryptocurrency firm.

Breadwinner received an undisclosed amount of funds from SBI Group to help with its operations. Breadwinner AG is a Swiss company that develops crypto products like the recently launched mobile wallet BRD. Reportedly, BRD is already operational in 170 countries and has had 1.8 million downloads by both Android and iOS users.

According to the announcement made on their website, SBI Group stated that it plans to expand its capacity and agreements with digital assets related companies to build a digital-based ecosystem. SBI Group said:

“We will continue to concentrate on investing and tie-ups with digital asset-related venture companies with high technical capabilities, while seeking synergies with existing digital asset-related companies within the SBI group.”

In the six months that ended on September 30, 2018, SBI Holdings registered over 176 million yen (about $1.6 million) in revenue as per SBI’s Interim results.

SBI is not new to investing in the crypto space. The company has shown great support for the blockchain and crypto community for quite some time. Last August, the company made a second investment in LastRoots, a cryptocurrency exchange which was being watched by authorities. At the time, SBI stated that their move to invest in the company was to help the exchange improve its internal system so that it can eventually get the need approval from the Financial Services Agency (FSA).

In the same month, another subsidiary of SBI Holdings, SBI Saving bank in Korea announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Dayli Intelligence which specializes in artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies.

Earlier in 2018, SBI purchased 40% of CoolBitX, a cryptocurrency hardware wallet in Taiwan. The wallet company is known for its CoolWallet, which can interact with other devices over Bluetooth.

SBI Holdings also has a crypto exchange, called VcTrade. The exchange recently added Bitcoin Core (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP). SBI also partnered with R3 to promote Corda Blockchain in Asia and partnered with Ripple to launch an international remittance allocation.