Sony, best known to many consumers for PlayStation, music, and movies, has supported and co-developed public blockchains through Sony Block Solutions Labs since the launch of Soneium mainnet in January 2025. Soneium boasts 5.4 million active wallets and over 250 live applications on Ethereum L2, which has facilitated over 500 million transactions to date.
Rather than being sketched in a Sony boardroom and handed off to a team of outside contractors, Soneium was co-developed through the Sony Block Solutions Lab, a joint venture between Sony Group Inc. and Startail Group, a blockchain company with staff from more than 20 countries.
Much of the engineering, infrastructure, and developer tools associated with Soneium are led by the Startale team, bringing Sony decades of hard-earned lessons about what brands, distribution networks, and audiences actually want. This collaboration was strengthened earlier this year when Sony Innovation Fund invested an additional $13 million in Startail.
So why does Sony need blockchain?
Simply put, Sony has spent its entire corporate life in the emotional business of games, movies, music, anime, cameras, and more. These are products that people have grown attached to, and what networks like Soneium are trying to offer is a way for that attachment to have real weight: fans owning a piece of what they love, creators are compensated more directly, and digital items move with people rather than being locked away within one platform.
None of that depends on tokens going to the moon, but on the digital plumbing that’s already working. And since much of Web3 has been sold on speculation rather than utility, Sony’s view seems to be focused on the tangible value that existing audiences can process without worrying about the underlying mechanics. Regarding this matter, Sota Watanabe, CEO of Startail Group, recently reportedly said the following:
“Startale has been a key partner for Sony since Soneium’s early days. Our vision is to bring the world on-chain, and Sony’s continued support strengthens our ability to provide the infrastructure needed to realize that vision on a global scale.”
What developers actually get
For those building Soneium, Soneium is designed to feel familiar and runs on top of Optimism’s OP stack as part of a superchain. This means that anyone can use standard Ethereum tools without having to relearn the technology. The ecosystem also includes Startale USDSC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin designed to support payments, rewards, and app-level payment flows across Soneium.
But greater appeal makes it harder for rivals to imitate, and thus gain reliable reach. Sony and Startale envision Soneium as a way to bring Web3 to Sony’s broader entertainment, gaming, and technology audience, and integrations like LINE Mini Apps demonstrate the distribution scale they’re pursuing.
For independent developers, it’s the difference between shipping to a blank space and shipping to an audience that already exists. The applications currently on the network reflect that appeal, with many clustered around fan engagement, digital collectibles, intellectual property (IP) licensing, and AI-assisted creative tools.
Watanabe articulated his ambitions, explaining that the goal is to make Soneium the primary on-chain hub for entertainment on Ethereum.
What Users Get Isn’t Based on the Hype
Access is carried out through the Startale app, which combines a wallet, a series of mini-apps, and a rewards system on one screen. Additionally, the app is designed to hide many of the usual Web3 frictions, such as wallet complexities, seed phrases, and gas fee interactions.
Finally, while it would be easy to put Soneium alongside the long list of corporate blockchain experiments that were announced with much fanfare and canceled within a year, the numbers belie that view, as its testnet phase alone attracted around 14 million wallets. As a result, what is being built is a long game, pointing in a direction the industry has been talking about for years, but not quite achieving much (i.e. bringing blockchain to people who are not yet crypto-savvy).
