Sony, best known to many consumers for PlayStation, music, and film, has been backing and co-developing a public blockchain through Sony Block Solutions Labs since Soneium’s mainnet launch in January 2025. Soneium is an Ethereum L2 that has facilitated more than 500 million transactions to date, all while boasting 5.4 million active wallets and upwards of 250 live applications.
Soneium was not sketched out in a Sony boardroom and handed off to a team of outside contractors, but rather co-developed through Sony Block Solutions Labs, a joint venture between Sony Group Corporation and the Startale Group, a blockchain firm with staff pulled from more than 20 countries.
Much of the engineering, infrastructure, and developer tooling related to Soneium has been led by the Startale team, with Sony bringing the brand, the distribution network, and a few decades of hard-won lessons about what audiences actually want. That working relationship was reinforced earlier this year, when the Sony Innovation Fund invested an additional $13 million in Startale.
So why would Sony want a blockchain?
The short answer is that Sony has spent its entire corporate life in the business of emotion, be it games, films, music, anime, or cameras. Those are products people have grown attached to, and what a network like Soneium is meant to offer is a way for that attachment to carry real weight, i.e., fans owning a piece of what they love, creators being paid more directly, digital items that travel with a person rather than being locked inside one platform.
None of that depends on a token going to the moon but on digital plumbing that already works. And because much of Web3 has been sold on speculation rather than usefulness, Sony’s read appears to be one where it is looking at concrete value that its existing audiences can be handled without being asked to care about the machinery underneath. On the matter, Sota Watanabe, chief executive of Startale Group, was recently quoted as saying:
“Startale has been an important partner to Sony since the early days of Soneium. Our vision is to bring the world onchain, and Sony’s continued support strengthens our ability to deliver the infrastructure required to realize that vision at global scale.”
What developers actually get
For the people building on it, Soneium has been designed to feel familiar, running on Optimism’s OP Stack as part of the Superchain, which means standard Ethereum tooling can be used without anyone having to relearn the craft. The ecosystem also includes Startale USDSC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin designed to support payments, rewards, and app-level settlement flows across Soneium.
The bigger draw, however, is harder for rivals to copy, i.e., gaining solid reach. Sony and Startale have framed Soneium as a way to bring Web3 to Sony’s broad entertainment, gaming, and technology audiences, while integrations such as LINE Mini Apps point to the scale of distribution they are pursuing.
For an independent developer, that is the difference between shipping into a void and shipping toward an audience that already exists. The applications now live on the network reflect that pull, with many clustered around fan engagement, digital collectibles, intellectual property (IP) licensing, and AI-assisted creative tools.
Watanabe has put the ambition plainly, describing the goal as making Soneium the main onchain hub for entertainment on Ethereum.
What users get is not hype driven
Access runs through the Startale App, which folds a wallet, a set of Mini Apps, and a rewards system into a single screen. Moreover, the app is designed to hide much of the usual Web3 friction, including wallet complexity, seed phrases, and gas-fee interactions.
Lastly, while it would be easy to file Soneium alongside the long list of corporate blockchain experiments that were announced with fanfare and abandoned within a year, the numbers argue against that reading, as its testnet phase alone drew roughly 14 million wallets. Consequently, what is being built is a long game, one that is pointed in a direction the industry has talked about for years without quite delivering (i.e., bringing the blockchain to people who are not already crypto-savvy).
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