Building The Road
In the last 2 years, Astar Network has always held offline meetings for all team members every year. The first time it was held in Japan, then last year it was held in Croatia. But why in Europe? Because almost all Astar engineers come from there. Here, one of Astar’s biggest planning milestones to date occurred, the expansion towards Ethereum as L2, then dApp Staking v3 and Tokenomic 2.0. In April 2024, it was back in Japan again just when the cherry blossoms time. And as usual, after every annual meeting new goals will be set. The result, eventhough not yet announced, is highly anticipated.
At the last meeting, there were more than 60 participants. What was even more surprising was that all parties from Startale also took part in the meetup. As a reminder, Startale is a separate entity founded by the founder of Astar Network, namely Sota Watanabe. Startale itself was founded specifically as a business entity on the Astar Network. And one of their biggest clients is Sony Network, a subsidiary of Sony. And in 2023, they collaborate to form Sony Network Labs with 90% ownership by Sony Network, and 10% by Startale. Their biggest focus is building the Sony blockchain, a blockchain network.
Based on the interesting facts above, we can speculate that there is a very deep connection between the Astar Network and the Sony blockchain which will be launched in the near future. Moreover, Astar launched Astar zkEVM last March, using Polygon CDK. Even though there were many unexpected obstacles in early April, the Yoki Origins campaign was still busy with users. Due to the Reorg problem on L1 Eth carried out by Polygon, this unexpectedly resulted in problems with block creation on Astar zkEVM as Astar zkEVM using Polygon CDK. But of course this can be handled well. On dApp Radar, it was recorded that transactions on the Yoki Origins smart contract had again reached all time high as previously.
From these various achievements, Astar Network has once again succeeded in fulfilling the objectives it wanted to achieve. But back to speculation, which is being discussed discreetly in several underground Astar groups and several trader groups. The first one is will the Astar Network be abandoned once the Sony blockchain is launched? This output is very little chance to happen as Astar Network is already have a very good reputation on Polkadot ecosystem and starting to gain attention on broader Ethereum communities.
The second one is will Astar be acquired by the Sony blockchain if Sony released their blockchain? Although this will complicate ongoing governance and tokenomic issues. As Astar currently wants to implement Astar Governance in a very short time. This will give many stakeholders and communities access to improve and direction to Astar. And if Astar implement full chain Governance, the merge will became difficult to happen.
The last one is will Astar instead be rebranded as the Sony blockchain? This rebranding for once has already been carried out, previously Astar was first called Plasm Network and then changed its name to Astar Network right before they announced their first crowdloan on Polkadot back in 2021. Sota Watanabe has explained that there will be an announcement of the new objective as results from yesterday’s offline meeting between Startale and the Astar Foundation. Let’s just wait!
