"Authenticating Bank Communications with NFTs" under a MIC Program: The First Japanese Counter-Disinformation Grant Built on a Public Blockchain

A national counter-disinformation budget picks "banks x public chain"

The MIC program is a contracted-research scheme meant to accelerate deployment of countermeasures against AI-generated fake images, video and audio. The FY2026 call ran from April 22 to May 22, 2026; 13 of 26 applications were selected. The implementation guidelines cap total awards at JPY 1.5 billion including tax (roughly USD 10 million) and each project at about JPY 200 million (about USD 1.3 million), with the project period running from contract signing to March 15, 2027. Awardees include NEC, NTT Docomo Business, the Originator Profile Technology Research Association, Code for Japan and JTB, spanning four technology categories: authenticity-judgment support, authenticity assurance and tamper-detection support, visualization and analysis of information spread, and spread prevention. Social Path's project is titled "Development and Demonstration of Web3.0-Based Authentication and Verification of Information Authenticity for Countering False and Misleading Information at Financial Institutions," and the company states its implementation window as August 2026 to March 2027.

Post-level NFTs as "prebunking-style" authenticity assurance

The company's goal is to certify that information issued by financial institutions comes from a trusted source, is unaltered and is not issued by an impersonator, and to let any viewer verify this easily. The core technologies are two patent-pending methods, "environment-specific NFTs" and "robustness NFTs," which use a blockchain's distributed trust base and the uniqueness of NFTs to attach authenticity at the level of individual posts, including high-frequency social-media posts by individuals and organizations. Multimodal fakes such as misused bank logos and celebrity-impersonation investment videos are in scope. In counter-disinformation practice, prebunking refers to building resistance before exposure, by analogy to vaccination, as opposed to debunking after spread, by analogy to treatment. Social Path frames issuer-side pre-attachment of authenticity proofs as "prebunking by the sender," aimed not only at protecting viewers but at containing reputational and compensation exposure for the institutions themselves.

Rapidly rising losses behind the trial

Citing National Police Agency statistics, the company notes that unauthorized internet-banking transfers in 2025 reached a record of about JPY 10.397 billion (about USD 70 million), with phishing accounting for roughly 90% of methods. Losses from social-media investment fraud reached JPY 127.47 billion (about USD 850 million), up 46.3% year on year, with recognized cases up 48.7% to 9,538. On October 9, 2026, the Financial Services Agency also urged financial institutions, in light of successive breaches leaking ID-document images and increasingly sophisticated impersonation, to tighten remote identity verification and to move to IC-chip reading ahead of the April 2027 effective date. While customer-side identity checks are being hardened, customers still have few means to verify whether a message claiming to come from a bank is genuine. That is the gap this trial addresses.

What XDC Network and SBI's involvement signify

XDC Network, the chosen implementation layer, is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 designed around trade finance. It advertises roughly two-second finality and near-zero fees under its XDPoS consensus, and its official documentation describes support for core ISO 20022 message types. In Japan, SBI VC Trade began handling XDC in May 2023, and SBI XDC Network APAC was established in December 2023 as a joint venture between SBI Holdings and TradeFinex Tech. In July 2026 NTT DOCOMO GLOBAL joined as a masternode validator, and SBI VC Trade has long operated a validator. In August 2026 SBI XDC Network APAC was also selected for an Osaka Prefecture subsidy to test vLEI-based KYB and on-chain export factoring, so this award gives it a third proving ground: the authenticity of financial-institution communications. Having the SBI Group inside the consortium makes it more realistic both to secure participating institutions and to engage supervisors.

When NFTs beat C2PA and digital signatures

Existing authenticity technologies include C2PA, which embeds provenance metadata in images and video; DMARC and BIMI, which authenticate sending domains and display verified logos in email; digital signatures on documents; and JPKI using Japan's My Number card. All root trust in the issuer's keys or certificates, but C2PA metadata is often stripped when content is reposted or screenshotted on social media, DMARC and BIMI are confined to the email channel, and signatures and JPKI require verification software or card readers on the viewer's side. NFTs on a public chain gain the advantage when verifiers must not depend on any single operator or platform, and when per-post environmental data from ever-changing social channels needs to be checked by third parties against a public ledger. Conversely, for communications that stay within a bank's own domain, DMARC or signatures suffice; the NFT approach is best seen as a complement specialized for channels outside the institution's control. The program requires results reports and social-implementation plans to be published around February to March 2027, and those will be the first public data on verification rates and deployment costs by channel and content type, and hence on whether this technology choice holds.

[Business Development Insights]

1. A national counter-disinformation budget adopting public-chain NFTs for authenticity assurance means that "authenticating our own social-media communications" has become an officially recognized technical problem for Japanese banks. Budget lines for authenticity proofs alongside DMARC, BIMI and C2PA deployments may appear in FY2027; infrastructure providers should be ready to offer verification APIs, validator operations and key management as a bundle.
2. SBI XDC Network APAC is running three public-sector pilots on XDC in parallel: trade finance, KYB and information authenticity. The strategy is to concentrate multiple regulated use cases on one chain. For anyone seeking enterprise adoption of a public chain in Japan, the selection criterion will be accumulated credibility from government and municipal programs rather than the chain's intrinsic merits, so co-proposals to subsidy and contract programs should be the primary business-development channel.
3. Unlike C2PA, where a standards body owns the specification, NFT-based authenticity here is designed as proprietary patent-pending technology. That favors early movers, but banks will scrutinize vendor lock-in and patent ownership as conditions of adoption. Providers can take lock-in off the negotiating table by opening verification logic and supporting multiple chains early.

[Sources]

https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000002.000193791.html https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_sosiki/joho_tsusin/d_syohi/taisakugijutsu_fy2026.html https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/001068679.pdf https://www.soumu.go.jp/menu_news/s-news/01ryutsu02_02000471.html https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/001068718.pdf https://www.npa.go.jp/bureau/safetylife/sos47/new-topics/260213/03.html https://www.sakigake.jp/news/article/20260312CO0052/ https://www.fsa.go.jp/news/r8/sonota/20261009/20261009.html https://docs.xdc.network/enterprise/iso-20022/ https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260715142687/en/ https://www.sbigroup.co.jp/news/pr/pdf/2026/0828_b.pdf https://www.sbigroup.co.jp/english/news/pr/pdf/2026/0713_a_en.pdf https://coinpost.jp/?p=501328 https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/2093864.html