Astar

Sota Watanabe founded Stake Technologies in Japan in 2019. Plasm Network appeared in May 2020 as the team’s public route into Polkadot smart contracts and scaling research.

By June 2021 the name had become a constraint. The team’s own FAQ said outsiders kept reducing Plasm to Layer 2 even though its intended product now joined EVM, WASM and Layer-2 work. Rebranding to Astar preserved the community and planned balances while retiring Plasm support.

Astar entered Polkadot with an economic feature that was not a normal validator nomination scheme. dApp Staking let holders direct locked ASTR toward applications, paying builders and stakers from block emissions.

The mechanism changed. Version 3, live from February 2024, split the lock from the project choice and reset stakes at each period boundary. Tokenomics 3.0 later reduced the active reward set to 16 projects per era. Registration still passes governance or the Community Council; popularity alone does not place code on the list.

Astar zkEVM launched on March 6, 2024 using Polygon technology. It offered an Ethereum-facing venue for Japanese enterprise and consumer campaigns alongside, rather than inside, the Polkadot parachain.

On August 23 the Foundation announced a transition to Soneium. Deposits would stop at Soneium’s public launch, sequencing would slow and remaining users would be guided out. On March 31, 2025 the zkEVM was officially deprecated: bridges and RPC submission ended.

In July 2024 Astar completed a burn of 350 million ASTR, 5% of the seven-billion genesis supply. The tokens came from a parachain-auction reserve whose intended use had disappeared as Polkadot’s slot economics changed.

The burn and zkEVM closure sit near each other on a timeline but not in one transaction. The first reduced native issuance through governance and a balances burn; the second retired an L2. Combining them would falsely imply that closing the L2 destroyed its bridged balances.

Sony Block Solutions Labs—the Sony Group and Startale joint venture—launched Soneium mainnet on 14 January 2025 using the OP Stack. Astar had joined as a special partner, directed incentives toward Soneium applications and positioned ASTR as an ecosystem asset.

That relationship does not transfer Soneium operation to ASTR voters. The Astar Foundation coordinates Astar products and ecosystem strategy; Startale is a core contributor supporting network infrastructure and is also Soneium’s co-builder; Sony Block Solutions Labs operates the partner L2. The same people or organizations may overlap, but the legal and technical roles do not.

Native ASTR follows the Astar runtime: issuance, referenda, councils, treasury and emergency origins. Holders may propose, endorse and vote. Main Council controls membership and main-treasury actions, Technical Committee can fast-track and pause, and Community Council manages dApp registration and its treasury. The overview names a Finance Council as a fourth body, but the detailed governance guide does not define its permissions.

On Soneium, the same ticker is represented by UUPS proxy `0x2CAE…9441`. Authorized CCIP and Superchain contracts mint or burn during transfers. The review snapshot identifies a Safe wallet as owner, and verified code gives that owner role-management and upgrade authority. A bridge mint changes the destination representation; it is not the native runtime issuing ASTR by an ERC-20 owner call.

Seven billion was the starting supply, not a permanent cap. After the reserve burn, emissions continued under protocol rules. Tokenomics 3.0, activated in March 2026, lowered the annual ceiling to 5.5% and introduced decay intended to converge supply toward roughly ten billion.

The result is neither fixed-at-seven-billion scarcity nor unconstrained admin minting. Native emissions are runtime-governed; contract representations are permissioned bridge instruments; both require checking current governance and contract roles rather than relying on the ticker.