What It Takes to Bring Institutional Finance On-Chain | Masa 'Senshi' Kikuchi at Pragma Tokyo 2026

Masa “Senshi” Kikuchi, Founder and CEO of Secured Finance, shares lessons from Japan’s JGB onchain repo working group. He compares the fragmented clearing, custody, execution, settlement, and reconciliation functions of traditional finance with DeFi’s integrated protocol stack. Using Secured Finance’s integration of UBS’s tokenized money market fund on Ethereum, he examines two models for Japanese government bonds: a custodial wrapper and a native book-entry asset that preserves the bond’s existing legal nature on a distributed ledger. The talk focuses on the operational boundary between blockchains and established financial infrastructure. Execution venues, custodians, legal agreements, approvals, credit lines, balance sheets, privacy controls, and back-office workflows must all fit the shared ledger. Kikuchi argues that builders should define the legal asset, locate hidden settlement and liquidity costs, map participant responsibilities, and design permissioned visibility from the start. Code, legal rights, and institutional workflows must agree before onchain finance can scale. 00:00 Introduction and JGB Repo Working Group 01:07 Mapping TradFi Functions to DeFi 02:31 The Full Financial Protocol Lifecycle 03:08 UBS Tokenized Fund on Ethereum 04:15 What Is an Onchain Japanese Bond? 04:36 Wrapper Versus Native Book-Entry Models 06:39 Responsibilities Around a Repo Trade 07:30 Operations Approval Before Settlement 08:20 Where Blockchain Fits Institutional Markets 09:31 Connecting Existing Execution Venues 10:10 Credit, Liquidity, and Balance Sheets 11:16 Finding Hidden Settlement Costs 12:19 Delivery Versus Payment Economics 13:00 Privacy as Institutional Information Control 14:17 Permissioned Visibility for Ethereum 15:07 Reusing Legal Agreements and Data Models 17:25 Five Questions Before Building 19:10 Asset, Constraints, Boundaries, and Control _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇯🇵 *Pragma Tokyo 2026* Pragma Tokyo 2026 was held on September 25th at the Toranomon Hills Forum in Tokyo, Japan and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Tokyo 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT7ZDw43Z98U ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Masa 'Senshi' Kikuchi X: https://x.com/masa_web3 ✅ Follow Secured Finance X: https://x.com/Secured_Fi ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city