Sony, best known to many consumers for PlayStation, music and film, has supported and co-developed a public blockchain through Sony Block Solutions Labs since the launch of Soneium on the mainnet in January 2025. Soneium is an Ethereum L2 that has facilitated over 500 million transactions to date, all while boasting 5.4 million active wallets and over 250 live applications.
Soneium wasn’t 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 company with staff from more than twenty countries.
Much of the engineering, infrastructure and developer tools related to Soneium are led by the Startale team, with Sony bringing the brand, the distribution network and a few decades of hard-won lessons about what the public actually wants. That working relationship was strengthened earlier this year when the Sony Innovation Fund invested another $13 million in Startale.
So why would Sony want a blockchain?
The short answer is that Sony has been concerned with emotions throughout its business life, whether in games, movies, music, anime or cameras. Those are products that people have become attached to, and what a network like Soneium needs to provide is a way to give that attachment real weight, meaning fans owning a piece of what they love, creators getting paid more directly, digital items that travel with a person instead of being locked into 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 utility, Sony appears to be one to look at the concrete value of serving existing audiences without being asked to worry about the underlying machinery. On this issue, Sota Watanabe, CEO of Startale Group, recently said:
“Startale has been a key partner for Sony since the early days of Soneium. Our vision is to bring the world on-chain, and Sony’s continued support strengthens our ability to deliver the infrastructure needed to realize that vision on a global scale.”
What developers actually get
For the people building on it, Soneium is designed to feel familiar, running on Optimism’s OP Stack as part of the Superchain, meaning standard Ethereum tooling can be used without anyone having to relearn the trade. The ecosystem also includes Startale USDSC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin designed to support app-level payments, rewards, and settlement flows in Soneium.
However, its wider appeal is harder for rivals to copy, i.e. to gain solid reach. Sony and Startale have framed Soneium as a way to bring Web3 to Sony’s broad entertainment, gaming and technology audience, while integrations like LINE Mini Apps point to the scale of distribution they’re aiming for.
For an independent developer, that’s the difference between shipping to a void and shipping to an audience that already exists. The applications now available on the network reflect that appeal, with many applications clustered around fan engagement, digital collectibles, intellectual property (IP) licensing and AI-enabled creative tools.
Watanabe has clearly stated the ambition, describing the goal as making Soneium the premier onchain hub for entertainment on Ethereum.
What users get is not hype-driven
Access is via the Startale app, which folds a wallet, a set of mini apps and a rewards system into one screen. Additionally, the app is designed to hide many of the usual Web3 frictions, including wallet complexity, seed phrases, and interactions with gas costs.
Finally, while it would be easy to place Soneium next to the long list of enterprise blockchain experiments that were announced with great fanfare and abandoned within a year, the numbers argue against this reading, as the testnet phase alone attracted approximately 14 million wallets. Consequently, what’s being built is a long game, one that points in a direction the industry has been talking about for years without any payoff (i.e., bringing the blockchain to people who aren’t yet crypto-savvy).