🌏 Challenges & Solutions
The mission is beautiful. Reality is standing in its way.
The previous chapter described the economy we want to build. This one describes the world as it actually is — a booming market whose energy never reaches the people who carry the culture — and the technology that finally makes a different structure possible.
A ¥10 trillion market that skips the people who carry it
Japan's inbound tourism market is growing toward ¥10 trillion (~$66 billion) per year. Yet little of that benefit reaches the ground: the shrines, the guides, the family workshops, the regional towns that make Japan worth visiting.
The slice we are actually aiming at
We are not trying to take all ¥10 trillion at once.
Our first target inside that market is the culture experience, guide, and local tour segment. We treat 1% of that segment — around ¥100 billion (~$660M) — as our initial goal. Start small, grow strong.
| Phase | Strategy | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Start small | Focus on culture experiences and guided tours; build a track record and grow by word of mouth | Establish a revenue base |
| Grow strong | Bring in foreign currency (inbound revenue) and prove the mechanism that shares it with the ecosystem | Build trust in the MTC economy |
| Raise quality | At scale, stop chasing volume; deepen experience quality, activity range, and community | A sustainable cultural economy |
Grow through the quality of the people involved and the depth of the experience — not through volume. That is MTC's expansion strategy.
What Web2 platforms got right — and what they cost
Web2 travel platforms brought the joy of travel to people all over the world, and we are genuinely grateful for what they built. But a centralized structure comes with unavoidable side effects.
Algorithms decide what gets seen. Operators compete for placement, a single review can swing sales wildly, and commission rates change at the platform's whim. The people on the ground live in constant fear of being picked — or of disappearing.
What this structure produces is division. The shop next door becomes a rival; fencing off customers makes more sense than cooperating. Travelers, meanwhile, see only options flattened into star counts and rankings, and truly valuable experiences get buried.
Revenue outflow — much of the revenue leaves the country as commissions to overseas OTAs (online travel agencies) and layers of intermediaries.
Local exhaustion — the burden of overtourism stays behind, while the revenue that matters never comes back to the community.
The wall of experience — algorithm-chosen, homogenized tours dominate, and visitors never meet the real Japan.
Japanese operators struggle, travelers never meet the real thing, and the wealth vanishes into the platforms.
The tools to change the structure finally exist
Today, for the first time, the technology to change this structure at its root has arrived — and each piece answers one of the failures above.
Commission rates and conditions are carved into code. Nobody can change them on a whim; everyone operates under the same rule, automatically.
Every transaction is recorded on a public ledger anyone can inspect. The era of data locked inside a corporation is over.
Roughly 0.4-second finality and a typical fee of $0.0003 (¥0.04) per transfer (Q1 2026). No stacks of middlemen fees, no multi-day settlement. Why Solana
A leap in productivity is making the heavy cost structure of giant platforms a thing of the past — small teams can now run deep, multilingual operations.
We are no longer in an era where people need intermediaries to connect. With this technology we free the inbound economy from monopoly, return revenue to the people on the ground, and build a structure to protect and connect the world's cultures — starting with Japan's.
Diagnosis is easy; the hard part is the engine that makes the alternative self-sustaining. The next chapter shows it: the economic flywheel that turns real demand into buybacks, liquidity, and rewards.