Soneium - Sony's Foray Into Blockchain: What You Need to Know
ASTR x Soneium, Sony Block Solutions Labs, & More
Friday saw several interesting announcements that prove important for the crypto industry. Most importantly, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell signaled that he would indeed begin the next rate-cutting cycle, triggering some significant upward momentum in the markets. RFK Jr. also dropped out of the Presidential race and endorsed President Trump, which could definitely help to swing moderates to vote red come November. As BTC has been trading closely with election developments and skewing toward a pro-Trump bias, this was also taken well by market participants. On the crypto-native front, a new Grayscale Avalanche Trust was also announced, which saw AVAX soar to the top of the token mindshare top gainers list. And to top it all off, leading into today’s topic, the Japanese entertainment and electronics conglomerate, announced it would be launching its own L2, dubbed Soneium.
This interesting announcement came amidst recent discussions around the state of L2s and what exactly constitutes an L2 vs a sidechain, and things of this semantic nature. Given the vast number of new chain launches, whether L1 or L2 or anything in between, the line between L2 and standalone L1 has been blurred, with more emphasis being placed by users on the actual activity designated to a given chain regardless of its underlying infrastructure. This was probably inevitable with the rise of modular service providers, who haven’t even come close to hitting their stride yet as there is mostly a lack of demand for these services right now.
The announcement of Soneium also came a day after Story Protocol’s now notorious $80M raise announcement. This development drew even more criticism for infrastructure. A lot of this criticism was mostly centered around the large amount of money raised, though some also focused on the actual premise of the idea, which is to tokenize the IP market and leverage existing entertainment connections the team already has. Soneium might be in a similar camp, with the main differentiator obviously being that the company backing this venture is a massive multinational conglomerate and didn’t raise additional funding. But both are building out infrastructure with more specific use cases in mind and direct or indirect relationships with products that could potentially be integrated into the chains from day one, much less of a cold start problem that exists.
Stay informed, stay alert ⬇
Background on Soneium
What some may not have previously known is that Soneium is not Sony’s first publicly announced venture into the blockchain space. Earlier this year, Sony announced plans to release its own crypto exchange, dubbed S.BLOX, after its acquisition of the Whalefin exchange back in 2023. Sony Blocks Solution Labs, headquartered in Singapore and established in October last year, will be the specific company in charge of the Soneium project.
Soneium is being built in collaboration with Startale, the organization behind Astar Network, the leading blockchain in Japan. Startale will be leveraging its Astar zkEVM implementation to help develop Soneium and integrate ASTR within the Soneium ecosystem. ASTR, up ~28% in the past 7D, saw some buy pressure after this announcement but not as much as one might expect, perhaps pointing to a gap between crypto market participants and more Asia-focused blockchains and applications.
Sony has been a brand that, so far, has done a good job at standing the test of time. The mega-corp has seen its share of name changes and brought numerous iconic products to the masses, including the walkman, and more recently, the playstation.
This Soneium news also comes in the same week as an unexpected Chinese game launch significantly boosted sales of the PlayStation 5, with Sony selling over 4.5M units last week. The game apparently received some flak for its Chinese origins as well as some ‘lack of diversity’ sentiments that were expressed. One can’t help but draw some sort of parallel between this and entering crypto, as entering crypto may also be a very profitable move for Sony but it definitely is not without its own objections which must be overcome. Maybe Sony knows something that their critics don’t?
Overall, there isn’t much publicly available information about Soneium released at this time. The most pressing areas to watch will be how intimate the relationship between Astar (and the ASTR token) is, and what specific applications will launch on the chain. The team has declared their efforts to make the chain very developer-friendly, definitely not strictly limited to Sony’s own existing products and services. The team has laid out their immediate plans to onboard Web3 developers and users, with a focus on existing Sony products slated for ‘Phase 2’ of the chain’s rollout. The plan seems to be for this phase to commence within two years. After this, the team will look to onboard various other enterprises not limited to Sony.
Similar to Story Protocol, Soneium also has explicitly made its own plans to help protect creator IP public;
“Specifically, we will explore protecting the rights of content created by creators, new mechanisms for returning profits to support creators and fans, and opportunities for creators to be active across the digital and real worlds.”
-Sony Press Release Regarding Soneium, August 23
Whether Soneium grows to attract lots of developers and users remains to be seen. At a minimum, this move shows a willingness for large companies with a history of innovation and adaptability to immerse themselves in the offerings of crypto. This move could also be interpreted as an interesting counterpoint to the trend when it comes to crypto in Asia, specifically in reference to domestic companies providing the lion’s share of products and services in a given country. This can be seen in the Korean CEX space, which is exclusive to its citizens, offering a different set of applications and standards than multinational exchanges. Other jurisdictions don’t allow access to Binance and instead see a lot of local volume going through local exchanges as well. How Soneium’s rollout plays out and whether or not the chain will play nice with games and applications around the world with less emphasis on jurisdiction remains to be seen.
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