By Marta González in the framework of the Minerva Fellowship Programme.

While Blockchain technology is still in an incubation stage — with only 10 years since its inception — Japan is taking ambitious steps to become a worldwide leader. The lack of local ventures in the Blockchain scene opens a rich landscape of business opportunities for EU companies in multiple industries. During the elaboration of this report, the author received many interest manifestations from Japanese companies to collaborate with European counterparts in a variety of sectors, specially finance but also others like food traceability, education or cryptocurrency mining. Additionally, also Japanese public institutions showed interest in learning from the EU regarding regulating cryptocurrencies.

Additional document: the recorded session of the webinar held on the 14th of January 2019.