While the Japanese government’s recent favorable turn toward blockchain and crypto is a cause for celebration for Yudai Suzuki, co-founder of Tokyo-based Web3 incubator Fracton Ventures, regulatory agility and an embrace of the industry’s inherent internationalism are necessary for government support to translate into domestic success, he said.

Plans for a native Japanese metaverse known as ‘Ryugukoku’ are now in development, while discussion of cryptocurrency regulation is expected to feature when Japan hosts the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima on May 19-21. Leaders from Japan, the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the U.S, will attend, as well as the European Union

However, government attitudes toward innovation remain wedded to legacy industrial norms of Japan’s post-war economic boom, while a heavy-handed approach to regulation has had a stymieing effect on the nation’s crypto industry to date, according to some reports.

In an interview with Forkast, Fracton’s Suzuki — who helped organize this month’s DAO Tokyo — discussed Japan’s pivot toward Web3, or the development of a new internet built around decentralized blockchain technologies, the metaverse, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).