In a conversation with journalist Laura Shin on the latest episode of Unchained, Bitwise Head of Alpha Strategies Jeff Park sketched a future in which Japan’s financial system—and the political imperatives that underpin it—place the country at the fulcrum of the next major wave of institutional Bitcoin adoption. Park, a former macro portfolio manager who now advises the$3.5 billion crypto asset manager, argued that Tokyo’s structural role in global credit markets, its historically deflationary domestic economy and a fast-emerging retail fascination with “digital gold” together give Japan unique leverage in shaping the monetary order that is forming around BTC.
Park sees a convergence of incentives pushing Japanese actors—retail, corporate and state—toward Bitcoin. Years of negative deposit rates and chronic demographic headwinds have left savers “starved for yield,” while institutions searching for growth “invest in US stocks directly” as an extension of the carry trade. Adding Bitcoin to that toolkit, he argued, offers Japanese investors an instrument “not only just incredibly volatile but high-performing… backed by Bitcoin, the one collateral that you can lean on that isn’t you being subservient to the funding model.”
Park’s analysis moves beyond price action and into geopolitics. He portrayed Bitcoin as a neutral reserve asset that could soften the asymmetric burdens created by dollar hegemony. “If Japan understands where the world is going in the store of value,” he said, “they should have an eye on a way to preserve wealth that touches Bitcoin.” He went further: “At the core, Japan is going to be a big player in ushering the era of Bitcoin adoption.” For Park, that eventuality follows from simple arithmetic. Should Japanese authorities choose to diversify even a modest slice of the country’s$1.1 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves—or the $8.7 trillion held in life-insurance and pension pools—into Bitcoin, the liquidity shock would be profound.
The interview also highlighted how a coordinated US–Japan approach could reshape the strategic Bitcoin reserves landscape. Park, while cautious about a unilateral American move, implied that a tandem accumulation programme might dampen market disruption and embed Bitcoin within existing alliance structures. “I think the US really does not understand the role of Japan even today,” he continued. “Japan is hinged to the butt of the American experience and the US must succeed together as an alliance.”
For now, Park sees the private sector leading. He pointed to Bitwise’s own analysis showing Japanese corporate treasuries experimenting with modest Bitcoin allocations, while regulators in Tokyo continue to refine guidance on custody, accounting and trust-bank administration of digital assets. That interplay between policy pragmatism and grassroots enthusiasm, he argued, could make Japan a laboratory for the capital-market instruments—convertible debt, perpetual preferred shares and exchange-traded funds—already proliferating in the United States.
Asked by Shin whether Japan’s ascent might accelerate if US mortgage rates remain high and domestic political consensus frays, Park nodded to generational dynamics: younger savers find Bitcoin “directionally the right thing to own as a way to grow wealth,” while Japanese youth, long resigned to stagnation, increasingly view the cryptocurrency as a lifeline. “It’s actually very acutely obvious to young people the role that Bitcoin can serve,” he said earlier in the programme when discussing housing affordability. In Japan’s context, he suggested, that clarity is amplified by a three-decade struggle against deflation and now a sudden, unfamiliar bout of inflation.
If Tokyo elects to move, it could catalyse coordinated reserve diversification, accelerate financialisation of Bitcoin-linked securities and underscore the cryptocurrency’s emerging role as a geopolitically neutral asset. As Park summed up: “Japan will be an incredible player for Bitcoin adoption”—and in the tight weave of global finance, the timetable for that pivot may ultimately set the cadence for everyone else.
At press time, BTC traded at $107,818.
