IOST NFTs and games: RIZIN, Signet and the Japan connection

The short answer

IOST has a real NFT and gaming history, and most of it happened in Japan between 2019 and 2023. The chain has its own NFT standard, IRC-722. Japanese companies built marketplaces, games and certificate services on it, and the biggest name among them is RIZIN, the mixed martial arts promotion, whose licensed NFT marketplace ran on IOST. The current flagship product is different: IOST Signet, a biometric ring sold with an NFT that proves ownership.

Around those facts sits a cloud of rumors. Search suggestions link IOST with Amazon, Sony, Samsung, Nintendo, Tencent, famous fighters, a well-known investor and a sumo champion. A few of these have a grain of truth, most have none, and the table at the end of this page sorts them out. If you want the general picture first, read what IOST is, then come back for the details.

One more thing before we start: most of these NFT and game projects are no longer active. They are worth knowing because they explain why IOST built such a strong following in Japan, not because you can still use them. For the wider DApp and DeFi story, see our IOST DApps and DeFi page.

RIZIN FIGHTING COLLECTION: the NFT marketplace that put IOST in front of fight fans

RIZIN FIGHTING COLLECTION was an NFT marketplace built on IOST by NFT-Japan, part of the Theotex Group, under a licence from Dream Factory Worldwide, the company behind RIZIN. It was announced in late August 2021. The idea was simple: licensed RIZIN digital collectibles sold on a Japanese marketplace, with IOST as the chain underneath.

Pre-registration came with rewards in a points unit called “RC”, and the project was shown at NFT WEEKS TOKYO in January 2022, with a full release planned for 2022. We could not confirm whether the marketplace is still live, so treat it as a 2021–22 project. The important point for search is what it was not. There is no “RIZIN FIGHTING COIN” token. That phrase most likely comes from the RC pre-registration points, or from an unrelated memecoin on another chain that borrowed a similar name.

RIZIN is the reason many Japanese fight fans first heard of IOST. In an October 2025 interview the IOST CEO also told a story from 2019, when the wallet of a well-known Japanese fighter holding a large IOST balance became public and set off a wave of buying among his fans. The fighter was not named, and we will not guess. If you read a name attached to that story somewhere else, it is speculation.

Games and NFT projects on IOST

IOST’s gaming reputation started in 2019 with Endless Game, a profit-sharing casino-style game ported from EOS that drew huge volume on its first day. The same year, the Japanese studio Eversystem ran an IOST version of its on-chain game CryptoNinja and later presented a post-mortem at the CEDEC 2019 developer conference. Both are long gone.

The NFT wave followed in 2021. TOKEN LINK by Platinum Egg used IRC-722 tokens for items from the GPS game CROSSLINK, which had more than 140,000 downloads. An NFT comic by Tamaki Chihiro was auctioned in April 2021 with royalties written into the contract. EMOGI Network brought its Revival marketplace to IOST in July 2021. The play-to-earn project Zodium partnered with IOST in September 2021, although its token lives on Ethereum and BNB Chain and we found no live IOST deployment. Dream Monster, a game by node partner XPET, was on the January 2022 roadmap, and tomonity, a fee-free Japanese NFT marketplace, ran pre-registration until April 2022, but we could not confirm it ever launched.

Later projects were smaller and more corporate. Climbers, a battle-race game by Platinum Egg featuring an IOST warrior character and an Akita-inu character made with Meta Akita, was announced as an ASOBIHACK TOKYO winner in December 2023. An aroma blending app issued membership NFTs in 2023 and 2024. Around 2024 a Hong Kong campaign offered 1,000 AI-generated IOST NFTs with a 200,000 IOST reward pool, according to an airdrop listing site. If you were hoping for an IOST metaverse, we found no metaverse project on IOST in the record.

IOST Signet: a biometric DID ring with an NFT attached

IOST Signet is the Foundation’s current hardware product. It is a smart ring, also called the PayPIN Ring, that uses an optical heart-rhythm sensor for what IOST calls “Proof of Heartbeat”, a form of decentralized identity. The specifications list a secure element rated EAL5+, NFC, Bluetooth and UWB, IP68 water resistance and a battery that lasts five to seven days.

Ownership works through an NFT. You hold the ring NFT in a wallet such as MetaMask, then open the IOST Signet app, create an account with your email, connect MetaMask or WalletConnect, pick a ring size and pay for shipping. The app launched on 6 November 2025. A “Signet Rewards” section tracks and claims IOST rewards, and the iost.io site ties ring purchases to a node you can claim. The CEO said in an interview that buyers could “mine” three times their purchase amount in IOST and that the Genesis sale sold out in about 30 minutes.

Two cautions. First, the privacy policy says the IOST Foundation collects biometric data such as heart rate, heart-rate variability, blood oxygen and sleep, and shares it with what it calls the StressWatch verification network. That is a lot of sensitive data to hand to a crypto foundation. Second, the “mining” framing is marketing for a reward schedule, not proof-of-work. IOST cannot be mined, as our IOST staking guide explains, and resale pitches for “Signet nodes” are a known scam pattern. More on how Signet fits the 3.0 plan is on the IOST 3.0 page.

ZUNA and the “yokozuna” searches

People search “IOST yokozuna” more than you might expect. The best explanation is ZUNA, a sumo-themed DeFi token that launched on IOST and was announced through a Cointelegraph press release. That release now returns an error page, and the token appears to be defunct. There is a second, more mundane link: one of the mainnet’s block-producer accounts is literally named yokozuna, and it appears on the explorer as the publisher of routine node transactions.

What there is not, as far as we can find, is a Hakuho NFT or any official yokozuna NFT on IOST. If someone offers you one, ask for the contract and check it on the explorer before paying anything.

Japanese node partners and institutions

IOST’s Japan story is unusually well documented, because the Foundation issued its announcements through the PR TIMES newswire. The timeline shows how the network grew from university events and startup spaces into exchange listings, staking and node partnerships with regulated companies. It also shows the recent reversal, as two of those partners stopped handling IOST in 2026.

1. Sep 2020Coincheck lists IOSTThe first Japanese exchange to do so, with IOST lending from the start.
2. Aug 2021RIZIN FIGHTING COLLECTION announcedNFT marketplace on IOST under RIZIN licence.
3. Oct 2021Japan Blockchain AssociationIOST Foundation becomes a full JBA member.
4. May–Sep 2022BITPOINT lists IOST, then runs a nodeThird Japanese exchange to list; node partner from September.
5. Sep 2023HashKey DX node partnerJoins the node partner list.
6. 2023CoinTrade “Mercury” nodeRun by Mercury of the Ceres group, a Prime-listed company.
7. Oct 2024A trust moves to mainnetCertificate registry with more than 37,000 certificates since 2019.
8. Jul–Aug 2026CoinTrade and BITPOINT drop IOSTHandling ended 8 July and 5 August per the JVCEA list.

A few details are worth unpacking. BITPOINT was the third Japanese exchange to list IOST in May 2022, became a node partner that September, and launched fee-free IOST staking in December 2024. CoinTrade, run by Mercury, a company in the Ceres group listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime market, ran the “Mercury” node and even let users convert Moppy loyalty points into IOST. HashKey DX joined as a node partner in September 2023. All of this made IOST look unusually embedded in Japan’s regulated market.

The 2026 picture is narrower. The JVCEA handling list records that CoinTrade stopped handling IOST on 8 July 2026 and the former BITPOINT system on 5 August 2026. Four FSA-registered exchanges still handle IOST: Coincheck, OKJ, BitTrade and Binance Japan. If you live in Japan, those are the honest places to buy, and our IOST in Japan guide and Coincheck review walk through them.

Beyond exchanges, A trust by Cabinet Inc. is the quiet success story: a digital certificate registry that moved from a private IOST setup to the public mainnet in October 2024. The Foundation joined the Japan Blockchain Association in October 2021, sponsors the Crypto Lounge GOX community space and appeared at WebX 2026 events. Be precise about the last one. IOST paid for a presence at an NTT DOCOMO GLOBAL event; that is an event sponsorship, not a partnership with NTT Docomo. The verified Japanese X account is @IOSToken_jp.

Outside Japan and want to start?

CEX.IO, running since 2013, sells crypto such as BNB by card. It does not list IOST and does not serve Japan, so readers in Japan should use an FSA-registered exchange instead. Elsewhere: crypto first, then an exchange that lists IOST.

Level up: open account

Rumor fact check: Amazon, Sony, BSN and famous names

IOST attracts a lot of partnership rumors, helped by its large retail following in Japan and Korea. We checked each claim against official IOST channels, company pages and exchange notices. “No evidence” means we found nothing from any primary source, so do not repeat the claim as fact.

Sony? No evidence!

The AWS story deserves a closer look because it is the one people get half right. IOST did announce a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services on 2 March 2023, aimed at bringing AWS infrastructure and Web3 tools to IOST developers. Separately, AWS China publishes a partner success story describing how IOST used services like EC2, EKS and Aurora through the AWS partner eCloudRover. That is a real relationship with a cloud provider, the same kind many blockchain projects have. It is not an Amazon investment, an Amazon payments deal or anything to do with the shopping site.

The BSN story is similar. In April 2020 the enterprise edition of IOST, run by a company called Aiou Technology, received a qualified developer certificate from China’s Blockchain-based Service Network. That is a developer credential. The IOST public chain was never shown to be integrated into BSN, and the phrase “Chinese government partner” is not supported.