Sota Watanabe: Building Web3 Infrastructure From Tokyo to the World

In January 2022 Sota Watanabe was giving interviews about protocol layers, developer tooling and enterprise integration. Token prices were still high and most of the industry was talking about something else.

Two years later Watanabe’s Startale Labs had a partnership with Sony to build Soneium, a blockchain platform for one of the best-known consumer electronics brands in the world. His Astar Network had grown into a leading multi-chain smart contract platform in the Polkadot ecosystem. And Japan, where he had stayed while many Web3 founders moved to Singapore, Dubai or Miami, had a crypto regulatory framework that global institutions were citing as a model.

Watanabe speaks at the Tech for Impact Summit 2026 in Tokyo on April 26. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson is on the same roster.

From the University of Tokyo to Polkadot

Watanabe graduated from the University of Tokyo and started in blockchain development while Japan’s crypto industry was still recovering from the Mt. Gox collapse and the Coincheck hack. Regulators were cautious and institutional money stayed away. Blockchain engineers were scarce in Japan, and the common move for a founder at the time was to leave for a jurisdiction with lighter rules and more crypto-native capital.

Watanabe stayed in Tokyo. He founded Astar Network, originally called Plasm, as a smart contract platform built on Substrate, the framework underneath Polkadot. Polkadot’s design let specialised blockchains interoperate through shared security, which allowed Astar to act as a hub connecting ecosystems rather than as one more standalone Layer 1.

Astar won a parachain slot on Polkadot, built a developer community across Japan, Southeast Asia and Europe, and integrated with both the Ethereum and Polkadot ecosystems. By 2024 it was the most prominent blockchain project led by a Japanese founder. Watanabe was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Japan that year.

Sony and Soneium

Startale Labs is the commercial arm of Watanabe’s work. It builds blockchain systems for institutions that need reliability, compliance and integration with the software they already run. Its most visible engagement is the partnership with Sony Group to develop Soneium, which draws on Sony’s distribution network, intellectual property and consumer reach.

Sony chose to partner with a Tokyo company on custom infrastructure, built to Sony’s own product requirements, regulatory obligations and user-experience standards, rather than deploy on an existing Layer 1 with deeper liquidity.

Startale has also won contracts with Japanese government entities and institutional clients. For executives weighing a blockchain strategy, the detail worth noting in those mandates is what the buyers were checking for: whether the system could pass an enterprise operations review, including compliance, auditability and integration with legacy systems.

Japan’s regulation

Watanabe has argued in public for years that Japan’s crypto rules, once a reason founders left the country, are now a reason to build in it. The summit runs during SusHi Tech Tokyo, so he will be making that argument to a largely Japanese audience.

After Mt. Gox and Coincheck, Japan wrote some of the strictest crypto regulation in the world. Exchange licensing, customer asset segregation and stablecoin frameworks came in years before most jurisdictions considered them. For a while founders and capital went offshore, to Singapore, Dubai and the Cayman Islands.

When FTX collapsed in late 2022, Japanese customers were among the first to get their assets back, because of the segregation rules that had been called excessive. The European Union’s MiCA framework and shifting U.S. enforcement made the old arbitrage jurisdictions less predictable. Japan kept refining its own rules over the same period: clearer guidance on token taxation, stablecoin issuance approved under defined conditions, and advisory panels that put industry figures like Watanabe in the room with regulators.

Sony, NTT, Toyota-affiliated entities and major Japanese banks are now exploring blockchain projects inside a legal structure their compliance departments can work with. Watanabe has spent years making that case to audiences abroad.

Identity and DAOs

Some uses of this infrastructure have nothing to do with enterprise revenue.

Digital identity, for a start. Japan, like most developed economies, is trying to work out how to issue portable, privacy-preserving digital credentials to a mobile population. Blockchain-based identity, where the individual holds the data instead of a central database that can be breached, runs on the systems Watanabe’s teams build. Astar’s multi-chain design means such credentials can move across ecosystems, which is where earlier digital ID programmes got stuck on vendor lock-in.

DAOs are another. Many enterprise leaders dismissed them as governance experiments. The mechanism underneath, transparent and programmable coordination among distributed stakeholders, has uses in impact investing, community development and cross-border collaboration, provided someone makes DAOs compliant, auditable and compatible with existing legal structures. Startale Labs is set up for that kind of work.

Watanabe has framed it the same way himself: making Web3 usable for enterprises and governments comes first, and lower intermediary costs and more equitable coordination follow from that, not the other way round.

On the T4IS stage

Over the last several years Watanabe has had three very different groups sign off on the same systems: Sony’s product teams, Japan’s financial regulators, and institutional investors who measure risk in basis points. That record is why he is on the programme.

Charles Hoskinson, who built one of the largest blockchain ecosystems in the world, shares the stage. Watanabe will be speaking from a more local position: the Japanese market, enterprise partnerships, and the engineering and compliance work that Soneium and the government contracts required.

For executives in the room the conversation will go past blockchain basics to the decisions companies and governments actually face: build or partner, public or private chain, jurisdiction as strategy, and how to measure the social return on a decentralised deployment.

The builder’s window

The crypto market has spent the period since 2022 swinging between fear and greed. Watanabe’s activity over the same period has been steady and mostly unexciting from the outside: the Sony partnership, the government contracts, compliance features designed into the protocol rather than bolted on afterwards. His reasoning, set out in his own commentary, is that institutional adoption will arrive once regulation is clear and the infrastructure is mature, and that the organisations already holding the right foundations at that point will set the terms. The companies that built cloud infrastructure in the years after the dot-com bust made a similar wager. It can only be judged afterwards.

Japan offers him predictable regulation, deep institutional capital, engineering depth and corporate investors who are used to long horizons. Watanabe has put himself at the centre of that.

The Tech for Impact Summit 2026 takes place on April 26 in Tokyo. Seats are limited and allocated by invitation. Request your invitation to join Sota Watanabe, Charles Hoskinson, and other global leaders shaping the future of technology and impact.