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Sony, known to many consumers for its PlayStation, music and movie products, has supported and participated in the development of a public blockchain through Sony Block Solutions Labs since the launch of the Soneium mainnet in January 2025. Soneium is an Ethereum L2 that facilitated More than 500 million transactions So far, all with 5.4 million active wallets and over 250 live apps.
Soneium was not designed in a Sony boardroom and delivered to a team of outside contractors, but rather co-developed by Sony Block Solutions Labs, a joint venture between Sony Group Corporation and Sony Group Corporation. Startel Groupa blockchain company with employees from more than 20 countries.
Much of the architecture, infrastructure, and development tools for Soneium were led by the Startale team, with Sony bringing the brand, distribution network, and a few decades of hard-earned lessons about what audiences actually want. This working relationship was strengthened earlier this year, when the Sony Innovation Fund invested an additional $13 million in Startale.
So why does Sony want blockchain?
The short answer is that Sony has spent its entire corporate life in… Passion worksWhether it’s games, movies, music, animation or cameras. These are products that people have become attached to, and what a network like Soneium aims to offer is a way for that connection to carry real weight, i.e. for fans to own a piece of what they love, for creators to get paid more directly, and for digital elements that travel with a person rather than being confined within a single platform.
None of this relies on code that goes to the moon, but rather on digital plumbing that actually works. And because so much of Web3 was sold on speculation rather than interest, Sony’s reading seems to be one in which it’s looking for tangible, relatable value to its existing audiences without being asked to care about the machinery underneath. In this regard, Sota Watanabe, CEO of Startale Group, was recently quoted Saying:
“Startale has been an important partner of Sony since the early days of Soneium. Our vision is to bring the world online, and Sony’s continued support strengthens our ability to deliver the infrastructure required to realize this vision on a global scale.”
What developers actually get
For the people who build on it, Soneium is designed to feel familiar and keep working OP stack for optimism As part of the Superchain, which means that standard Ethereum tools can be used without anyone having to relearn the craft. The ecosystem also includes Startale USDSC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin designed to support application-level payments, rewards, and settlement flows via Soneium.
However, a larger draw is more difficult for competitors to imitate, i.e. gain a strong 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 Simple LINE applications It indicates the size of the distribution they follow.
For an indie developer, this is the difference between shipping to the void and shipping to an audience that already exists. Apps now on the network reflect this attraction, with many clustered around fan engagement, digital collectibles, intellectual property (IP) licensing, and AI-powered creative tools.
Watanabe made his ambition clear, describing the goal as making Sunim the target Onchain’s main entertainment hub On Ethereum.
What users get is not driven by hype
Access is through the Startale app, which houses the wallet, a set of widgets, and a rewards system in one screen. Furthermore, the app is designed to hide a lot of the usual friction of Web3, including wallet complexity, seed phrases, and gas fee interactions.
Finally, while it would be easy to cast Soneium alongside the long list of corporate blockchain experiments that were announced with great fanfare and abandoned within a year, the numbers contradict this reading, as its testnet phase alone attracted nearly 14 million wallets. As a result, what is being built is a long game, one that is geared in a direction that the industry has talked about for years without fully delivering (i.e., bringing blockchain to people who are not already crypto experts).
