• Laser Digital's losses pushed Nomura's European business to a quarterly deficit

• Japan digital asset trading volume fell to 17.2 trillion yen in the first nine months

• Laser Digital secured a Japanese exchange license and conditional US trust bank approval in May

Sale Talks With Marex Group

Nomura Holdings, Japan's largest brokerage, is reviewing a sale of Laser Digital, its Swiss-based digital asset subsidiary, after volatility-driven losses turned the group's European business to a quarterly deficit. People familiar with the matter said on Wednesday that talks are underway with potential buyers, among them Marex Group, and that no final decision has been made. No timeline for a decision has been made public, and the review could still end with the unit sold to a different acquirer or kept inside the group. Nomura and Marex both declined to comment. The trigger sits in the numbers: Laser Digital's losses were large enough to put Nomura's entire European operation in the red for the quarter, and management has acknowledged that the high volatility of digital asset revenue is a structural feature of the unit rather than a one-off. Risk management procedures have been strengthened in response. Laser Digital itself was founded in 2022 and operates from Zurich, offering trading and asset management services to institutional investors while also backing early-stage digital asset startups. Because the subsidiary is headquartered outside Japan, the loss landed on the group's European line rather than on its domestic results; the review itself concerns the subsidiary, not Nomura's operations in its home market. Built to capture institutional flows at a moment when most banks confined their digital asset work to custody pilots and research notes, the unit now faces a question of whether it fits inside a brokerage's risk budget when trading revenue swings this hard.

Japan Volumes Halve as Bitcoin Sits Near $74,000

The market backdrop frames the timing. The wider Bitcoin market traded in the $74,000 range on Wednesday, more than 40% below its peak, the same zone where a brief dip below $74,000 forced $1.15 billion in liquidations. Japan's own activity has contracted just as sharply: the Japan Digital Asset Exchange Association's tally puts domestic digital asset trading volume, margin trades included, at 17.2 trillion yen for the first nine months of the year, a drop of more than half from the same period of 2025. Those figures cover credit trades as well as spot activity, making them the broadest public measure of Japanese participation in the sector. The retrenchment also unwinds an aggressive build-out. Late last year Laser Digital hired three derivatives traders from Galaxy Digital, and it recently secured a digital asset exchange license in Japan. In May the unit obtained conditional approval for a US trust bank charter, extending its regulatory reach beyond Switzerland. Together the hires and the licenses were meant to turn a two-year-old startup into a full institutional platform spanning Switzerland, the United States and Japan. The damage is not confined to the subsidiary: Line Genesis, in which Nomura has held a stake since 2019, shut its Line Bitmax exchange in June. Policy may yet soften the picture. Japan is moving to permit digital asset ETFs as early as next year and is weighing a lower tax rate on investment gains, changes that would hand any new owner a friendlier home market. Marex, meanwhile, already provides digital asset trading, clearing and financial services and launched an over-the-counter spot product for institutional clients last month, so the talks would pair a buyer with existing infrastructure rather than a blank-slate entrant.

The Licenses a Buyer Would Inherit

Read as a whole, the review is a risk decision before it is a strategic one: the volatility of the unit's revenue, not the size of its book, is what Nomura's European results could no longer absorb, a mechanism now repeating across the industry as fund selling ahead of the MSCI verdict builds. What remains available is nonetheless substantial. The Japanese exchange license, the conditional US trust approval and a derivatives team recruited from Galaxy Digital all stay in place while the process runs, and until any deal is signed, Laser Digital continues to serve institutional clients from Zurich. The open questions are the ones the people involved have not answered: price, timeline and whether a bidder outside the current talks emerges. A sale would transfer those assets intact; a decision to keep the unit leaves Nomura holding them into a policy environment Tokyo is actively loosening.