Industry hope accelerates Japan's Web 3.0—Interview with Sota Watanabe

2023 is the year of “mass adoption”

Industry hope accelerates Japan's Web 3.0

Astar Network brought the "first year of Web 3.0" to Japan with the launch of its mainnet. This year, we will focus on Japan through Startale Labs Japan.

2022 was the year that could be called the first year of Web 3.0. Significant progress has also been made in Japan, with the government expressing its intention to accelerate Web 3.0.

Astar Network founder Sota Watanabe is one of the people who brought the Web 3.0 trend to Japan. How does Mr. Watanabe, who collaborates with the Japanese government and large companies on various initiatives, view Japan's Web 3.0 this year?

Importance and goals of the Web3.0 area

It is most important for Japan to take global leadership.

Watanabe: I think the FTX shock was huge last year. Furthermore, in the United States, the staking service provided by Kraken has been indicted for violating securities laws, and given the statements made by SEC Chairman Gensler, there is a possibility that a difficult situation will arise in terms of legal frameworks overseas. On the other hand, Japan had strong regulations to begin with, so it was not significantly affected.

In the Web3.0 area, NTT Docomo announced a 600 billion yen investment, Toyota and we will be holding a Web3.0 global hackathon, and we will be conducting an incubation program with Sony. Large companies continue to enter the market.

Large companies have a positive attitude toward Web 3.0. I think it will be most important this year for large Japanese companies to enter the market and take global leadership.

Personally, I think there will be no more competitive thinking about which blockchain to use in the future.

For example, no one cares about which server they go through when using the Internet. The same is true for blockchain, and users are not particularly concerned about it.

We are aiming for a world where NFTs are simply issued and DeFi can be used properly. To do this, the layers must be completely connected. Currently, there are an increasing number of cases in which bridges are being hacked, so this is an important development point.

The other day, ASTR, which is issued on the Astar Network, entered the world's top 100 in terms of market capitalization. If we continue to boost this ecosystem and break into the top 50 or top 20, it will be said that Japanese projects have entered the world.

To that end, we need to make concrete concrete efforts with Toyota and Sony that are meaningful. In the future, many large Japanese companies will enter the market, so I think it is important to cover them thoroughly. This year, we will create use cases with companies through Startale Labs, which we established this year.

Regarding Astar's technological development, last year we added support for a new virtual machine called WASM (WebAssembly).

If EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) is a Windows OS, WASM is like a MacOS. Supporting WASM enables onboarding of Web 2.0 developers on Astar.

For example, it would be possible to write smart contracts using JavaScript. This will expand the scope and accelerate the realization of Web 3.0.

This year I'm focusing on Japan, and I think we're making a lot of progress domestically. We will continue to work closely with large companies, the Japanese government, and local governments to increase the variety of use cases.

Profile

◉Sota Watanabe

Founder of Astar Network, a public blockchain from Japan. CEO of Startale Labs. Next WebCapital, Hakuhodo key3 founder. He serves as a board member of the Japan Blockchain Association and an advisor for Marui Group, GMO Web3, Dentsu web3Club, etc. In 2022, he was selected as one of the 30 under 30 people in Asia in the technology category by Forbes magazine.

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