According to Woofun AI, Soneium, an Ethereum layer 2 network jointly developed by Sony (SONY.US) and Startale, released a vision document on October 26, officially adjusted its strategic focus to the “on-chain entertainment economy,” and announced plans to issue the ecological token SONEIUM, and the core business will completely shift to tokenized IP. Officials say there are more than 250 apps in the ecosystem, covering music, games, animation, movies, TV, collectibles, and fan creations.
This move marks a complete shift from the network's general positioning, which was initially aimed at driving the mainstream of Web3 through Sony's global channels, to a vertical racetrack with the tokenization of IP assets as a single core driver. Although the token economy model, distribution plan, and TGE timing are all marked as “to be announced later,” SONEIUM is clearly defined as an economic layer connecting creators, IP owners, developers, fans, and investors, in an attempt to reshape ecological expectations by restructuring the value capture mechanism in the context of a sharp loss of TVL.
In terms of specific IP asset classification and technical architecture design, Soneium has built a refined three-tier system. The first is an IP token representing a single creator, studio, or work. Moriusa, the first project to be launched, is a character IP owned by Tokyo Entertainment Group Super State Holdings. The total number of Moriusa NFTs was set at 2,222. OpenSea data showed that the cumulative transaction amount was about 2202 ETH, the floor price was about 0.48 ETH, and the increase was about 43% within 24 hours, showing the activity of the early market.
Next is IP Bond. The first partner, the Korean entertainment company DayOneDream, plans to use concert revenue from artists such as BTOB, LEE CHAE YEON (LEE CHAE YEON), MEMI, 2F, etc. into on-chain bonds to financialize the proceeds; the partnership was announced at Korea Blockchain Week in Seoul on September 29. The third type of IP Vault targets long-term assets such as music royalties, and no specific projects have been announced yet. On the technical side, Soneium has built a three-tier design of IP Registry (IP Registration), IP Graph (IP Relationship Map), and IP Execution Layer (IP Execution Layer) to record the origin of the work, sort out the relationship between the original work and the derivative work, and automatically distribute royalties according to the rules set by the IP owner.
At the same time, the network will support ERC-8432, an Ethereum standard that is still in the draft stage, called Onchain IP Asset and License Registry (Onchain IP Asset and License Registry). Soneium promised to support the standard on October 6, and its purpose is to allow AI agents to directly query license terms on the chain to link AI applications with copyright compliance. At the same time, the government emphasized that these capabilities complement the existing copyright framework rather than replace it. Notably, the first two partners were not part of the Sony Group, which suggests that Soneium is seeking broader entertainment industry cooperation independent of Sony's own IP.
The adjustments to the operation and maintenance architecture are as significant as the changes in the token narrative. As a member chain of Optimism Superchain built on the OP Stack, Soneium announced the adoption of OP Enterprise's fully managed service on September 30, handing over chain deployment, upgrades, sequencer, node infrastructure, monitoring and incident response to the Optimism Foundation and OP Labs, while the Soneium team retains ownership of the chain and control of the roadmap, and focuses on developing tokenized IP and on-chain entertainment products. According to the terms of service, OP Enterprise aims for 99.9% monthly uptime, but it does not involve deploying new chains or adding cross-chain functionality.
This outsourcing strategy freed up R&D resources, but it also changed the original token narrative structure. When Soneium announced in August 2024, ASTR, the native token of Astar Network, was positioned as the core asset of the ecosystem. Astar Network was founded by Startale CEO Sota Watanabe in 2019, and its zkEVM chain was merged into Soneium, developed by Startale's joint venture with Sony Block Solutions Labs, in 2024. In April 2025, Startale also announced that it would use part of the sequencer revenue to buy ASTR on the open market.
However, ASTR was not mentioned in the token section of this blog and vision document. ASTR now reports about $0.0064, down about 93% from the high of about $0.095 in December 2024, and has a market value of about $56.21 million; with a current circulation volume of about 8.79 billion units, Astar has set a long-term supply target of about 10 billion units, and FDV of about $64 million. ASTR's absence and collapse reflect Soneium's attempt to cut ties with past inefficient token narratives and instead establish a new SONEIUM value anchor.
According to data compiled by Woofun AI, TVL on the Soneium chain fell all the way back after hitting a high of about $203 million on May 23, 2025. As of October 27, it was about $9.39 million, down about 95.4% from its peak. Trading activity also declined. According to L2Beat data, Soneium's single-day transaction volume exceeded 3.4 million in January 2026, while the average daily transaction volume from October 1 to 26 was about 240,000.
This loss of funds is not an exception; L2s that have launched the main network in the same batch as Soneium are generally facing similar difficulties. From May 23, 2025 to the present, Unichain's TVL fell from about $532 million to about $25.69 million, a decrease of about 95.2%; Abstract's TVL fell from about $28.7 million to about $3.51 million, a drop of about 87.5%, and its developer (Igloo Inc.), the parent company of Pudgy Penguins, announced in early October that it would shut down Abstract on December 15. In contrast, Ink launched by Kraken bucked the trend over the same period, and TVL increased from around $7.05 million to around $199 million.
This horizontal comparison shows that in the absence of unique value capture mechanisms or strong incentives, general-purpose L2 can easily fall into the trap of running out of liquidity, and Soneium's IP transformation is a direct response to this industry pain point.
Despite falling on-chain data, Sony is investing more, showing its commitment to the long-term strategy. In January 2026, the Sony Innovation Fund invested approximately $13 million (approximately 2 billion yen) in Startale. Soneium has processed a total of about 757 million transactions, but blockchain explorer Blockscout shows that the number of weekly active addresses has dropped from about 835,000 in early May 2025 to around 22,000 in the week of October 19. The divergence between user loss and capital investment highlights the project party's anxiety about ecological construction.
Meanwhile, the IP blockchain pioneer story has taken a turn. Prior to Soneium, Story, which launched the mainnet in February 2025, was a representative project in the IP chain field. According to Bitget data, its native token IP (now DATA) once approached $15 in September 2025 and is now at around $0.14, down about 99%. Story's on-chain TVL fell from a high of around $45.12 million on September 23, 2025 to around $115,000 on October 20.
In June 2026, Story announced that the name was changed to DATA Foundation, and the network was renamed DATA Network. The business was shifting from IP tokenization to source verification, authorization, and payment of AI training data, and the original IP token was migrated to DATA on a 1:1 basis. The customer groups of the two chains have intersected, and WAVIST, a tokenization platform under DayOneDream, has previously been running on Story.
According to IP Strategy (IPST.US), a NASDAQ listed company with IP (now DATA) as its main reserve asset, disclosed in March 2026 that WAVIST's initial asset sales raised approximately $3.22 million, and the counterparties were SBI Digital Markets and Kyobo Life Insurance. WAVIST's operator Pledge (formerly WITCH Company, renamed after being acquired by DayOneDream in May 2026) is raising a $15 million fund. Today, WAVIST is the first partner of Soneium IP Bond, and this cross-chain migration further validates the limitations of the IP narrative at the pure financial level and the need to shift to AI or physical revenue links.
Currently, Soneium's only clear network economy adjustment is the plan to adjust the basic gas fee. Specific plans for SONEIUM tokens and TGE are yet to be disclosed later. According to Soneium's structure, royalties and revenue generated by IP will be distributed directly to the holders of the corresponding IP tokens and IP bonds, but there is no explanation of how SONEIUM tokens capture value from them and what specific rights the holders enjoy.
This ambiguity is particularly critical in the context of TVL plummeting 95%, as the market needs clear incentive compatibility mechanisms to re-attract liquidity. Soneium is trying to build a closed value cycle through IP tokenization, but its success depends on solving the problems of copyright confirmation, efficiency of revenue distribution, and standardization of AI agent interactions. In contrast to Story's shift to AI data verification, Soneium's adherence to the IP native narrative is both a differentiated competitive strategy and a high-risk game. Over the next few months, the details of SONEIUM's economic model and how it links to IP revenue streams will be key variables in determining whether the network can break out of the quagmire of L2 homogenization competition.