Astar ASTR / Astar

What Is Astar (ASTR)?

Astar is a web3 collective building products that bring users onchain and generate long term value for ASTR.

It operates as a multi chain ecosystem that coordinates products and contributors through a shared economic and governance framework. At the center is Astar Network, which provides the foundation for governance, security, and economic alignment across the ecosystem. Astar supports a growing set of products and integrations designed to drive real onchain usage and sustainable economic activity. Product development is guided by the Astar Stack, a unified product stack that turns blockchain infrastructure and finance into secure and user friendly applications aligned with Astar’s economic goals.

ASTR acts as the ecosystem’s economic and governance token, aligning network activity, product growth, and long term value creation.

Who Are the Founders of Astar?

The Astar Network was founded in 2019 by Sota Watanabe, a blockchain pioneer who featured in Forbes30 Under 30 Asia in 2022.

He has a degree in economics from Keio University in Japan. Throughout his career Watanabe has worked as a marketing specialist at Chronicled, at an IT-company in San Francisco, and has founded several companies in addition to those listed above, including Next Web Capital, an investment firm that supports entrepreneurs and their crypto startups.

The Astar Network was known as Plasm Network until 2021, at which point it rebranded to Astar and then launched as a multi-chain smart contract platform on Polkadot in January 2022.

Astar was developed by Stake Technologies, which is headquartered in Singapore and operates from Japan. Soto Watanabe, Astar’s founder, is also CEO of Stake Technologies.

What Makes Astar (ASTR) Unique?

The goal of the Astar project is to become a full-scale multi-chain smart contract platform that supports various layer 2 solutions, blockchains and virtual machines.

The network is built on Parity Substrate - a web 3.0 blockchain-building platform. Networks like Astar that build on Substrate benefit from features like upgradable blockchains, modular architecture, customizable block execution logic, and hot-swappable consensus. In other words, it's a framework built specifically for quick and easy blockchain development.

In addition to the Substrate modules, Astar offers features such as:

Operator trading: a mechanism for buying and selling dApps that allows you to tokenize smart contracts, transfer ownership to other users, or assign other users as operators.