Animoca Brands Japan and RootstockLabs gear up to put Bitcoin at the center of corporate treasuries

Animoca Brands Japan announced a collaboration with RootstockLabs to bring institutional-grade, Bitcoin-centered decentralized finance capabilities into the Japanese corporate environment. The effort is designed to adapt Rootstock’s institutional program for domestic use so that companies can integrate Bitcoin into treasury operations and access smart-contract-driven financial utilities anchored to Bitcoin’s security. Rootstock operates as a Bitcoin sidechain that leverages merged-mining to inherit security properties while permitting Ethereum-style programmability, and RootstockLabs acts as a primary contributor to that stack. Under the agreement, the partners will evaluate tokenized Bitcoin representations native to the Rootstock ecosystem and a suite of scaling and utility protocols intended to lower friction for decentralized applications. Animoca Brands Japan says it may layer these services into its existing Digital Asset Treasury Management Support Service to offer custody, asset management and onchain toolsets to corporate clients. The project explicitly frames regulatory alignment as a prerequisite, with both firms seeking designs that accommodate Japan’s compliance demands and financial oversight. This initiative follows a wider trend in Japan where a handful of public companies already hold large Bitcoin reserves, illustrating a domestic market receptive to corporate digital-asset strategies. If implemented, Rootstock-based instruments could enable programmable treasury actions—collateralized lending, tokenized liquidity and automated settlement—using Bitcoin-backed primitives rather than alternative blockchains. That said, routing enterprise treasury activity through a sidechain introduces operational and legal trade-offs: security assumptions differ from holding native Bitcoin, and regulators will press for clarity on custody, AML/KYC and accounting treatment. While the technical architecture promises lower transaction costs and faster execution for certain workflows, widespread uptake will depend on robust custody solutions, clear regulatory guidance and demonstrable risk controls. The partnership signals a pragmatic approach: combining Bitcoin-centric security with EVM-compatible tooling to meet corporate needs, rather than pushing speculative consumer products. If successful, the collaboration could accelerate corporate experimentation with programmable BTC exposure in Japan and set a template for institutional onchain finance in other regulated markets.