Recently, I have been researching the ecological development of Polkadot in Asia whenever I have free time. I found that Polkadot is ultimately a Western public chain technology ecosystem. This afternoon, I asked a circle of acquaintances who are working on blockchain games, and none of them are working on projects in the Polkadot ecosystem.
However, during the inquiry process, I also discovered a few Polkadot blockchain game projects belonging to the wider Asia-Pacific region, including: Japan's Astar Network chain, New Zealand's Mnet Pioneer metaverse project, and I've heard that many anonymous gambling projects use Polkadot public chain technology.
Today, I will first look at Japan's Astar Network.
The token of the Astar Network chain $ASTR has been available for spot trading on Binance since early 2022 and is a Layer1 public chain based on Polkadot technology.
The development team of Astar chain, Startale Labs, is also a public chain partner of Sony's blockchain subsidiary, Sony BSL, which is a Japanese entertainment giant. It’s equivalent to Sony providing funds and resources to outsource the development of its Ethereum Layer2 game public chain Soneium’s products and technology to Startale Labs. Interestingly, Soneium is built on OP Stack.
Of course, it’s not just about technology outsourcing. The Astar and Soneium chains are deeply integrated. The native token of the Astar chain $ASTR is also the governance token for the Soneium chain, used for governance, liquidity incentives, and transaction mediums in DeFi, NFTs, games, and consumer applications on the Soneium chain.
This is also very interesting.
The Soneium chain has not yet issued a token and has not announced which its native token will be. It still uses ETH as the gas fee payment token for the public chain. However, once any public chain grows strong, it will eventually launch its own native token as a transaction and gas fee payment token within the ecosystem. By then, how will the ASTR token still function as a governance token in the Soneium chain ecosystem?
I suspect there should be some acquisition and merger actions between these two public chains, so which token the Soneium chain uses for gas fees is not important, as it is all Sony's own anyway.
Currently, the Astar Network official website lists the ecological projects of the two public chains respectively. In addition to the separately listed Soneium chain, the other projects in the Astar ecosystem are also various dapps.
Last year, when Sony announced the launch of the Soneium game public chain, it caused quite a stir in the blockchain gaming player community, and subsequently released some NFTs, but it seems the hype was not very high.
Sister Cathy has played some Japanese blockchain games and is now not very interested in the blockchain games made by Japanese developers. She feels that their Tokenomics design is too stable, so she treats them as Web2 games without any opportunities for Play2Earn game gold mining and investment speculation.
Using CoinGecko to search for the project market capitalization ranking of the Soneium chain, the top two account for almost 2/3 of the total market cap of the entire chain, surprisingly being the btc staking project @Solv Protocol $SOLV .
The development pace of the Soneium chain has a distinct Japanese characteristic of being neither fast nor slow. The latest news on the official website is still from May regarding a promotional collaboration with a game from Square Enix.
Considering that the development of blockchain games across various chains has been quite average over the past year, Astar and Soneium currently have a total of 25 blockchain game projects launched, which is not an easy feat. Some of the games listed here are ones I have really not heard much about, and I plan to try them out one by one tomorrow.
Players who have played projects on the Astar Network chain or various games on Sony's Soneium chain are welcome to leave comments and share your experiences.
If anyone knows of any games developed by Chinese developers that are based on the Polkadot ecosystem, please share them with Sister Cathy for research, thanks!
