Foreign workers in Japan send billions of dollars home each year, and one company handles much of that flow. SBI Remit, the international transfer arm of Japan’s SBI Holdings, announced that its cumulative cross-border volume crossed ¥2.5 trillion since launch, equivalent to more than $15 billion at today’s exchange rates.
This matters for XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) because of how SBI Remit moves the money. SBI Remit became Japan’s first remittance provider to use Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity, which moves money across borders with XRP as the bridge currency between fiat pairs.
Ripple’s infrastructure has been part of that $15 billion since 2017, and the XRP-powered share has been scaling fast since the 2021 ODL launch. So what does this milestone look like, and what does it mean for XRP?
What SBI Remit’s $15 Billion XRP Milestone Looks Like
SBI Remit is the company doing most of Japan’s foreign worker remittance volume. Founded in December 2010 under Japan’s Payment Services Act, it has been operating for about 15 years, with fees starting at ¥460 (about $3) and transfers credited to recipients in as little as 10 minutes. Its main corridors run from Japan to the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other parts of Southeast Asia.
As of May 27, the company’s cumulative international transfer volume crossed ¥2.5 trillion, equivalent to more than $15 billion. That is the biggest milestone SBI Remit has ever announced. SBI Remit took 14 years to reach its first ¥2 trillion, or about $12.7 billion, then added the next ¥500 billion, or roughly $3.2 billion, in just the last 17 months—the pace has roughly tripled.
The $15 billion captures the entire business, including the corridors that still run on traditional rails alongside the Ripple-powered ones. However, the acceleration of the last 17 months falls right on top of the period when Ripple’s role inside the business expanded the most.
How RippleNet and XRP Power SBI Remit’s Transfers
Ripple sells two products to financial companies, and SBI Remit uses both. The first is RippleNet, a messaging system that lets banks and payment firms communicate about a transfer, similar to how SWIFT works but on Ripple’s own network. The second is On-Demand Liquidity, where real XRP moves between the two sides of the transaction as a bridge currency. SBI Remit started with RippleNet in 2017, then added ODL in 2021.
That 2021 step is what made SBI Remit relevant for XRP holders. SBI Remit became the first international transfer provider in Japan to use ODL, meaning XRP started moving between Japan and the Philippines every time a customer hit send. The initial corridor sent yen to digital wallets in the Philippines through a local partner called Coins.ph.
Two years later, in September 2023, the setup expanded to direct bank accounts in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia through Tranglo, a regional payments hub based in Singapore. That expansion opened the XRP corridors to bank accounts, which is where most remittance volume in those countries actually goes.
On-Demand Liquidity solves a specific problem. Traditional cross-border transfers force the sending company to keep money parked in destination-country accounts in advance, just in case anyone wants to receive there. That tied-up money costs real cash to maintain.
ODL skips the pre-funding entirely by using XRP as a bridge between currencies in real time, which Ripple says cuts liquidity costs by 60 to 70%. That cost cut is the reason XRP corridors are growing faster than the traditional rails next to them.
Why Japan Matters More to Ripple Than Anywhere Else
Japan is the single most important country in Ripple’s global footprint, and the reasons are concrete. SBI Holdings, SBI Remit’s parent company, is Ripple’s largest external shareholder, holding a roughly 9% stake it has kept since 2016 through the four-year SEC lawsuit when most institutional partners stepped back.
And more than half of Ripple’s worldwide On-Demand Liquidity volume flows through Japanese corridors. No other country comes close on either measure.
Moreso, Japan’s cabinet approved an amendment to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act on April 10, 2026, reclassifying XRP and 104 other crypto assets as financial instruments. The amendment still needs to clear the Diet, but once it does, implementation is set for fiscal 2027 and the first crypto ETF approvals are targeted for fiscal 2028.
SBI is already building Japan’s first XRP ETF in partnership with Franklin Templeton. And in March, SBI VC Trade became the first regulated distributor of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin anywhere in Asia, giving SBI a dollar-settlement layer to run alongside the XRP one.
Stacked together, the equity stake, the ODL share, the ETF in development, and the stablecoin distribution all point in the same direction. The $15 billion milestone is the first hard public number that shows the integration is translating into real money moved at a meaningful scale.
What This Milestone Means for XRP
The milestone proves something XRP critics often dispute, which is that the token is actually being used to move real money at meaningful scale, not just traded on exchanges. That is harder to argue with than it was a year ago.
What the milestone does not prove is that real utility automatically lifts the token’s price. ODL transactions complete in seconds, which means XRP gets bought and sold within the same trade rather than held as inventory. The volume moves through XRP, but does not stay there, and that is why years of growing remittance use have not lifted the price floor.
What could change that is now in motion. Japan’s FIEA implementation in fiscal 2027 and the first crypto ETF approvals in fiscal 2028 would unlock a different type of XRP demand, with investors holding the token long-term rather than algorithms bridging it for milliseconds. SBI is positioned to be first when that window opens, and the $15 billion milestone shows the foundation it would launch from is already there.
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