Sony, Electronics Pioneer Behind Walkman, Starts Own Blockchain ‘Soneium’

Sony, the Japanese electronics giant famous for developing the Betamax and Walkman in the 1970s, is now starting its own blockchain.

Sony Block Solutions Labs, a joint project between Sony Group and Singapore-based Startale Labs, said Friday it’s coming out with a new layer-2 network atop the Ethereum blockchain called Soneium.

The news signals that there may be a renewed interest from mainstream companies in building products for consumers with blockchain technology.

Soneium, expected to go live on a test network in the next few days, will make use of optimistic rollup technology, which allows users to transact on networks on top of Ethereum for cheaper. It will be built using the Optimism blockchain ecosystem’s OP Stack, a customizable toolkit that lets developers create their own networks using Optimism’s technology, with connections to other networks in the ecosystem via the “Superchain.”

Other networks that have famously chosen to use of OP Stack are the U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase’s “Base” and decentralized-identity project Worldcoin’s “World Chain.”

‘Onboarding Web3 people’

Startale Labs is led by CEO Sota Watanabe, who is also the director at Sony Block Solutions Labs and co-founded the Astar Network. Startale spun out from the Astar Foundation, and helped maintain the Astar zkEVM, which leverages Polygon’s Chain Development Kit (CDK,) a competitor to the OP Stack, but making use of Polygon’s zero-knowledge technology.

Startale will be focusing its efforts and resources from now on only on Sonenium, and moving away from Astar zkEVM, Watanabe told CoinDesk in an interview.

“Astar zkEVM will be integrating its assets and underlying infrastructure with Soneium,” Sony Block Solutions Labs wrote in a press release shared with CoinDesk.

The “first year is all about onboarding Web3 people, because technology-wise and the community-wise, it is a little bit early to onboard the general users,” Watanabe told CoinDesk. “And then phase two, within two years, we’re going to onboard Sony products, such as, Sony Bank, Sony Music, Sony Pictures and so on. So we would like to integrate Web3 and blockchain technology into Sony’s product. And in three years, we would like to onboard not only Sony, but also all enterprises and all general dapps on the top of it.”