Story, once a leading project for putting IP on-chain, has pivoted to AI data. Now Soneium is announcing a token launch and betting on IP.
Written by Sanqing, Foresight News
There’s a new development in the Web3 business of Sony, one of Japan’s best-known corporate giants.
On October 26, Soneium, an Ethereum Layer 2 network based on the OP Stack and developed through a joint venture between Sony and Startale, released a vision document repositioning itself as an “on-chain entertainment economy.” It is shifting its core business to tokenized IP and plans to issue an ecosystem token, SONEIUM.
This marks a clear departure from Soneium’s original positioning. When it was unveiled in August 2024, its goal was to “go mainstream” by leveraging Sony’s global user base and bringing Web3 applications to sectors including entertainment, gaming, and finance. Protecting creators’ rights was then just one envisioned use case.
Soneium says SONEIUM will serve as an economic layer connecting creators, IP owners, developers, fans, and investors. However, the vision document devotes just one paragraph to the token. Details of its tokenomics, distribution plan, and TGE date will be “announced later.”
From a general-purpose L2 to an IP asset platform
Soneium divides tokenized IP into three types of assets.
The first is the IP Token, representing an individual creator, studio, or work. The first project to launch is Moriusa, a character IP created by Tokyo-based entertainment company STPR.
STPR operates Strawberry Prince (すとぷり), a virtual idol group whose official YouTube channel has over 3.66 million subscribers. Its parent company is Super State Holdings. Moriusa has a total supply of 2,222 NFTs. OpenSea data shows cumulative trading volume of around 2,202 ETH, a floor price of about 0.48 ETH, and a 24-hour gain of roughly 43%.
Next is IP Bond. Its first partner, South Korean entertainment company DayOneDream, plans to turn concert revenue from its artists into on-chain bonds. The third type, IP Vault, is aimed at assets such as music royalties; no specific projects have been announced yet.
On the technical side, Soneium has built a three-layer architecture comprising IP Registry, IP Graph, and IP Execution. These layers record the provenance of works, map the relationships between original and derivative works, and automatically distribute royalties according to rules set by IP owners. The network also supports the ERC-8432 standard, allowing AI agents to query licensing terms directly on-chain.
Optimism will handle the underlying operations. As a member chain of the Optimism Superchain built on the OP Stack, Soneium announced on September 30 that it had adopted OP Enterprise’s fully managed services. The Optimism Foundation and OP Labs will handle chain deployment and upgrades, the sequencer, node infrastructure, monitoring, and incident response. Soneium will retain ownership of the chain and control of its roadmap, allowing the team to focus on developing tokenized IP and on-chain entertainment products.
Neither of the first two partners is part of the Sony Group, and the new token plan also rewrites Soneium’s original token narrative.
When Soneium was announced in August 2024, it positioned Astar Network’s native token, ASTR, as the ecosystem’s core asset. Astar Network was founded in 2019 by Startale CEO Sota Watanabe, and its zkEVM chain was integrated into Soneium in 2024. Soneium is being developed by Sony Block Solutions Labs, a joint venture between Startale and Sony. In April 2025, Startale also announced that it would use part of its sequencer revenue to buy ASTR on the open market.
But ASTR is not mentioned in the token sections of the blog post or vision document released this time. According to Bitget data, ASTR is currently trading at around $0.0064, down roughly 93% from its December 2024 high of about $0.095. Its market capitalization is around $56.21 million. The current circulating supply is about 8.79 billion tokens, while Astar’s long-term supply target is around 10 billion, putting its FDV at about $64 million.
On-chain TVL has fallen 95%
DefiLlama data shows that Soneium’s on-chain TVL peaked at around $203 million on May 23, 2025, and has since declined steadily. As of October 27, it stood at about $9.39 million, down roughly 95.4% from its peak. Transaction activity has also fallen. L2Beat data shows that Soneium’s daily transaction count once exceeded 3.4 million in January 2026, while its average daily transaction count from October 1 to 26 was around 240,000.
L2 networks that launched their mainnets around the same time as Soneium are generally facing capital outflows. From May 23, 2025, to the present, Unichain’s TVL fell from around $532 million to about $25.69 million, a drop of roughly 95.2%. Abstract’s TVL declined from around $28.07 million to about $3.51 million, down roughly 87.5%. Its developer, Igloo Inc. (the parent company of Pudgy Penguins), announced in early October that it would shut down Abstract on December 15. By contrast, Kraken’s Ink grew over the same period, with TVL rising from around $7.05 million to about $199 million.
Despite the decline in on-chain metrics, Sony continues to invest. In January 2026, Sony Innovation Fund invested an additional roughly $13 million (about 2 billion yen) in Startale. According to L2Beat, Soneium has processed around 757 million transactions in total. But data from block explorer Blockscout shows that its weekly active addresses fell from around 835,000 in early May 2025 to about 22,000 in the week of October 19.
A pioneer in putting IP on-chain has already pivoted
Before Soneium, Story, which launched its mainnet in February 2025, was a flagship project for putting IP on-chain. Bitget data shows that its native token IP (now DATA) briefly approached $15 in September 2025; it is now trading at around $0.14, a drop of roughly 99%. According to DefiLlama, Story’s on-chain TVL fell from a peak of around $45.12 million on September 23, 2025, to about $115,000 on October 20.
Story has now abandoned this direction. In June 2026, it announced that it was changing its name to DATA Foundation and renaming its network DATA Network. Its business is shifting from IP tokenization to verifying the provenance, licensing, and payment of AI training data. The original IP token will migrate to DATA at a 1:1 ratio.
The two chains now have overlapping customer bases. WAVIST, the tokenization platform operated by DayOneDream, previously ran on Story. According to a March 2026 disclosure by Nasdaq-listed IP Strategy, whose primary reserve asset is IP (now DATA), WAVIST’s first asset sale raised around $3.22 million. WAVIST is now the first partner for Soneium IP Bond.
Under Soneium’s architecture, royalties and revenue generated by IP will be distributed directly to holders of the corresponding IP Tokens and IP Bonds. The existing documents do not explain how the SONEIUM token will capture value from this, or what specific rights its holders will have.
So far, the only clearly stated change to Soneium’s network economics is a planned adjustment to the base gas fee. Specific plans for the SONEIUM token and its TGE have yet to be disclosed.