Speaking at the NexTech Week trade show in Tokyo on Thursday, Masaaki Taira, a lawmaker in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and head of its Web 3.0 project team, said Japan has seen the future — and it’s blockchain.
Taira — an outspoken cryptocurrency advocate — used his presentation on national strategies for emerging technologies to highlight Japan’s capabilities in Web3, or the vision of a new Internet built around decentralized blockchain technologies, the metaverse, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
“While other jurisdictions attempt to regulate a space that is not yet fully understood, Japan already has a relatively good grasp of what it is that we’re trying to promote,” Taira said, adding that global technology companies are taking note.
Japan’s government and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida have become enthusiastic backers of emerging technology, and Web3 in particular, as pillars of the country’s economic future. This at a time when U.S. cryptocurrency exchanges are being hit with lawsuits that are generating regulatory turmoil and doubts…