Cashing out crypto to yen in Japan, wherever your coins are

Where are your coins? Pick your route

Before you think about fees, answer one question: where do your coins live right now? In Japan, the only legitimate place for a resident to turn crypto into yen is a crypto-asset exchange registered with the Financial Services Agency (FSA). If your coins are anywhere else, you first have to move them onto one of those exchanges, and that move falls under the Travel RuleRule requiring exchanges to pass sender and recipient names along with crypto transfers. Japan applied it from 1 June 2023. that Japan has applied since June 2023.

Every route below ends in the same place: sell on a domestic exchange, then withdraw to a bank account in your own name. The full list of licensed operators is on our FSA-registered exchanges list.

Selling on a Japanese exchange, step by step

If your coins are already on a domestic exchange, cashing out happens entirely inside the app: sell, watch yen appear in your account balance, withdraw to the bank. Often the money arrives the same day. The two decisions that change what you take home are where inside the app you sell and which exchange you withdraw from.

1. Choose where to sell

   The big "sell" button usually goes to the dealer desk (販売所, hanbaijo)販売所 (hanbaijo): the exchange itself buys from you at a quoted price. Easy, but the gap between buy and sell prices is your real cost.. The cheaper option is the order book (取引所, torihikijo)取引所 (torihikijo): a market where users trade with each other at prices they set. Fees run from 0% to about 0.15%., where you sell to other users for a small fee.

2. Place the sell order

   A market order fills immediately at the best available price; a limit order waits for your price. If you are selling a large amount, split it so you don't walk the price down yourself.

3. Register your bank account

   Only a Japanese bank account in your own name is accepted. The name on the bank account needs to match the name on your exchange profile. If your residence card, bank and exchange spell or order your name differently, sort that out before you sell.

4. Request the yen withdrawal

   Enter the amount and confirm. Watch the minimums: GMO Coin wants at least ¥10,000 per withdrawal, and SBI VC Trade allows one withdrawal a day from ¥1,000.

5. Save your records

   Download the CSV trade history now, and keep the annual transaction report (年間取引報告書) the exchange issues. You will need both if you file a tax return.

How much does the choice in step 1 matter? Take a ¥1,000,000 bitcoin sale. On an order book with a 0.05% taker fee you pay ¥500. On a dealer desk where the sell price sits 2% below the reference price, roughly ¥20,000 disappears into the spreadThe difference between the buy and sell price at the same moment. On dealer desks it replaces the fee and widens when markets are volatile.. Coincheck publishes its dealer spread range (0.1% to 5.0%); most other exchanges do not publish theirs at all. We break this down exchange by exchange on the fee comparison page.

The catch is that order books list fewer coins than dealer desks. SBI VC Trade, for example, runs order books for just eight assets including BTC, ETH and XRP. If your coin isn't on the order book, the dealer desk is your only option, and for a few tens of thousands of yen the difference is usually a few hundred yen. Use whichever screen you are comfortable with.

What it costs to withdraw yen

Once you have sold, moving the yen to your bank costs anywhere from nothing to a little over ¥1,000. The table shows the fees on each exchange's official fee page. bitFlyer and Rakuten Wallet block access from our research environment, so their figures come from archived copies of the official pages and may have changed; check the app before you withdraw.

SBI VC Trade and GMO Coin are the two exchanges that charge nothing. The trade-off is in the conditions: GMO Coin's ¥10,000 minimum and SBI VC Trade's one-a-day limit make them less handy for frequent small withdrawals. bitbank charges ¥550 to ¥770 but pays out instantly at any hour, which is useful if rent is due on a Sunday.

Don't judge on the withdrawal fee alone. Coincheck charges ¥407 to withdraw but nothing on its main order books. bitFlyer has historically charged less for withdrawals to SMBC. The cheapest combination depends on your bank and on how much you sell at a time.

Skipping the bank: PayPay, Rakuten Cash and Merpay

Japan's super-apps give you a few ways to receive sale proceeds as spendable balance instead of bank money. If you already live inside one of these ecosystems, they save a step.

Binance Japan → PayPay

Sale proceeds can be paid out as PayPay MoneyPayPay balance charged from a bank account after identity verification. Unlike Money Lite, it can be sent back to a bank. for ¥110, up to ¥1m per 24 hours and ¥2m per 30 days. You can cash out straight from a dealer-desk sale or, since April 2026, withdraw yen already sitting in your account. Setup is covered in our PayPay crypto guide.

Rakuten Wallet → Rakuten Cash

Rakuten Wallet can sell crypto straight into Rakuten Cash (楽天キャッシュ) with no charge on top of the spread, a feature running since February 2021. A normal bank withdrawal costs ¥300 per the archived fee page.

Mercoin → Merpay balance

Coins held in Mercoin inside the Mercari app sell back into your Merpay balance, from ¥1. Check Mercari's help pages for the current rules on moving that balance to a bank.

Receiving PayPay Money or Rakuten Cash instead of bank yen changes nothing for tax. The sale is still a sale, and any profit counts the moment it happens.

Coins stuck on Bybit, Bitget or another exchange that left Japan

Plenty of foreign residents opened accounts on global exchanges before moving to Japan, or while those platforms still accepted Japan residents. That window is closing. Bybit stopped new sign-ups from Japan at the end of October 2025 and announced a phased exit on 22 December 2025. Bitget moves Japan-resident accounts to close-only from 1 November 2026 and force-closes remaining positions on 31 December 2026; crypto withdrawals are reported to stay open after that. Both have received FSA warnings for operating without registration. Binance's global platform moved its Japanese users to the separately licensed Binance Japan back in 2023.

The compliant way out is to send the coins, as crypto, to an FSA-registered exchange and sell there. Under the Travel Rule, an exchange-to-exchange transfer carries the sender's and recipient's names. When the sending platform is unregistered or sits in a country without equivalent rules, the Japanese exchange collects the same information from you, assesses the risk and decides whether to accept the coins. Some exchanges refuse deposits from particular platforms altogether, so read the receiving exchange's help pages before you press send.

• Confirm the domestic exchange accepts deposits from the platform you are leaving.
• Copy the deposit address and check the network (chain) matches on both sides.
• Fill in the recipient's name and receiving exchange accurately on the withdrawal screen.
• Send a small test amount first and walk through the deposit declaration once.
• Answer the domestic exchange's questions about where the funds came from, truthfully.
• Download your full trade history from the old platform while you can still log in.

Japanese exchanges use different Travel Rule messaging systems (Sygna and TRUST, for example), and some combinations can't talk to each other. Many people therefore withdraw to their own wallet first and deposit from there. That is fine, as long as you declare the true origin of the funds when asked.

Sending from MetaMask, Ledger or another wallet

Coins in a wallet you control are also cashed out through a domestic exchange. A wallet where you hold the keys, an unhosted walletA wallet not run by any exchange or company, where you hold the private keys yourself. Also called self-custody., sits outside the Travel Rule's messaging requirement, but the FSA expects exchanges to collect and keep information about who owns it.

In practice that means a declaration screen when the deposit arrives ("Is this your own wallet?", "Where did the funds come from?") or a requirement to register the address in advance. Under the Japan Virtual and Crypto assets Exchange Association (JVCEA) rules, exchanges can trace the funds back to their first origin and restrict your use of coins that look suspicious. The flow differs between exchanges, so read the deposit help page before sending.

Two technical traps catch people out. First, sending a token the exchange doesn't list, or using a network it doesn't support, can lose the coins or leave them stuck for weeks. Second, XRP and a few others need a destination tag. If you hold a token that only trades on a DEX, you will need to swap it into something the exchange lists, such as ETH, and that swap is itself a taxable crypto-to-crypto trade. Our wallet guide covers which exchanges send to and receive from self-custody wallets.

The tax bill starts the moment you sell

For Japan residents, crypto profits are generally miscellaneous income雑所得 (zatsu shotoku): the catch-all income category. It is added to your salary and taxed at your marginal rate.. They are added to your salary and taxed at 5% to 45% national income tax plus 10% resident tax, so up to 55% at the top bracket. There is no lower rate for holding longer.

The taxable moment is the sale, not the bank withdrawal. Leaving the yen on the exchange or taking it as PayPay Money doesn't defer anything. Moving coins between your own accounts is not a sale. Swapping one coin for another and paying for something with crypto both are.

Your gain is the sale price minus your cost. If you bought in several lots, the cost per coin is worked out with the total-average method総平均法: divide everything you paid in the year by the number of coins bought to get one average cost. The alternative recalculates the average after each purchase. or the moving-average method. Sell for ¥1,000,000 coins that cost you ¥400,000 and you have roughly ¥600,000 of income. At a combined marginal rate of 30%, set aside about ¥180,000. Try your own numbers in the calculator at the top of the page.

If you are salaried by a single employer and your income outside salary is ¥200,000 or less for the year, you don't need to file a national income tax return, though a resident tax declaration to your city office is still required. Domestic exchanges issue an annual transaction report that makes the maths easier; offshore platforms typically don't, which is another reason to download your history before an exit date. Arrived in Japan with coins bought years ago, or planning to leave? Read moving to or leaving Japan with crypto before you sell.

Japan has also legislated a 20.315% separate taxationTaxing one type of income on its own at a flat rate, rather than adding it to salary. Japanese stock gains already work this way. regime for qualifying crypto, with a three-year loss carryforward. It applies only to sales through registered domestic operators and is expected to start in 2028 at the earliest; no official start date has been set. The details are in our 20% tax reform explainer, and the current rules with worked examples are in the Japan crypto tax guide. For your own situation, talk to the tax office or a licensed tax accountant (zeirishi).

Large amounts, bank checks and money from abroad

When you are cashing out millions of yen, limits and checks take more time than fees. GMO Coin caps withdrawals at ¥30 million a day; Binance Japan's PayPay payouts stop at ¥1 million per 24 hours. Plan backwards from the date you need the money.

On 6 August 2026 the FSA and the National Police Agency asked the crypto industry to tighten anti-fraud controls: holding periods on sending crypto out after a yen deposit or purchase, advance registration of withdrawal addresses with a waiting period, withdrawal caps, and checks that the sender's name matches the account holder. If you register a new address or move freshly deposited money right before cashing out, expect delays.

Very large sales on an order book can move the price against you. For amounts above roughly ¥10 million, the registered OTC desks in Japan quote a price and settle in yen, which avoids thin order books.

If you are tempted to sell on a foreign platform and wire the money home instead, know that Japanese banks file an overseas remittance report (国外送金等調書) with the tax office for any transfer into or out of Japan above ¥1 million. Whichever route you take, the profit still has to be declared. Keep these records together:

• Annual transaction reports from each domestic exchange
• CSV exports of sales and withdrawals
• Transfer records from offshore platforms and wallets (date, amount, transaction ID)
• Purchase records that prove your cost

The same records answer the questions a bank may ask about a large incoming transfer.

Leaving Japan? Sort out your accounts first

Expats often decide to cash out just before moving. Two points are worth knowing. First, Japan's exit tax (国外転出時課税) applies to people with ¥100 million or more in securities and similar assets, and crypto is not on the list of covered assets under the current rules. Second, since 1 January 2026 Japanese exchanges have collected a tax-residence self-certification from customers under the OECD's crypto reporting framework (CARF), so your exchange will know which country you report to.

Exchange terms differ on what happens when you move abroad, and they pay yen out only to Japanese accounts in your own name. Read your exchange's terms before you book the flight, and get advice on which country taxes a sale made around your departure date. Our crypto for foreigners guide covers account rules for non-Japanese residents, and the main guide to buying crypto in Japan compares the exchanges themselves.

Cashing out in Japan: FAQ

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