According to TechFlow, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) held its first formal meeting with the country’s government to discuss central bank digital currency (CBDC). According to local TV channel NHK on January 26, the government and the Bank of Japan agreed to resolve legal issues related to the issuance of digital yen in the spring of 2024.
Neither the Bank of Japan nor the government has officially confirmed the launch of a digital yen, and any decision would be made after a “national discussion” in 2026 at the earliest.
It is reported that in December 2023, the Bank of Japan saw the report of the Ministry of Finance's expert group, which recommended the "immediate" issuance of the digital yen. The experts decided that Japan's CBDC should coexist with cash and that the Bank of Japan must limit potential personal data storage to a minimum. The Bank of Japan ended the second phase of its CBDC test in May 2023. The test ran for a year and included 100,000 users and 5 intermediaries with a load of 500 and 3,000 transactions per second. The experiment was declared a success and the Bank of Japan continued its scheduled CBDC pilot project, which should examine the "end-to-end process" and further connections with external systems.