Behind Sony's Public Chain Soneium's Token Launch, Layer 2 Aims to Tell New Stories in the Entertainment Industry

Author: Zen, PANews

Two years after its establishment, Sony's Ethereum Layer 2 network Soneium is finally launching its token.

On October 26, Soneium, a joint venture between Sony Group and Startale Group, announced the issuance plan for its native ecosystem token, SONEIUM. Besides the token launch itself, a comprehensive entertainment economic plan was also unveiled, which is equally noteworthy.

Soneium stated that it will establish a new business system around Tokenized IP (IP tokenization). This marks a significant strategic adjustment since Soneium's mainnet launch in January 2025: the Sony-backed public chain, which previously focused more on developing an ecosystem around gaming, anime, music, and consumer-level Web3 applications, is now shifting its focus to the intellectual property, commercial revenue, and financing needs behind entertainment content.

According to Soneium's vision, these businesses will connect with the planned issuance of the SONEIUM token, forming an economic network that covers creators, copyright holders, fans, developers, and investors. Consequently, new business opportunities and challenges will arise.

Searching for New Engines in the On-chain Winter

Soneium's initial positioning was as a blockchain connecting Web3 applications with mainstream consumers. However, in the current on-chain winter, Soneium has redirected its focus towards its strengths in IP business.

Soneium, which will officially debut in August 2024, is operated by Sony Block Solutions Labs, a joint venture between Sony Group and Startale Group, and will open its mainnet in January 2025. At that time, Sony Group pointed out that Web3 technology still faces challenges such as complexity of use and a lack of killer applications that can attract ordinary users. Soneium hopes to provide creators with new monetization channels through the integration of blockchain infrastructure and application services, while strengthening their connections with fan communities.

On December 26, 2025, Soneium released its first annual summary after the mainnet launch, presenting impressive performance metrics: a total of 455 million transactions processed, 5.3 million active wallet addresses, over 3.4 million smart contracts deployed, and more than 250 ecosystem applications.

However, as the industry entered a winter this year, on-chain data began to show a different picture.

As of October 26, Soneium had only about 160,000 transactions and over 4,000 active addresses in a single day. Compared to the millions of historical wallet addresses accumulated, the scale of daily use is relatively limited. According to DefiLlama data, Soneium's DeFi TVL has dropped from a historical high of about $203 million in May 2025 to about $9.4 million on October 26, 2026, a decrease of over 95%. During the same period, its on-chain stablecoin supply was about $6.72 million, and the 24-hour trading volume on decentralized exchanges was only about $160,000.

Soneium's ecosystem growth is sluggish, as evidenced by a small detail in the announcement: Soneium announced at the end of 2025 that it had over 250 applications, yet in the latest strategic announcement in October 2026, the official still used this figure without disclosing more detailed information on active applications, paying users, or ecosystem revenue growth.

In the face of developmental difficulties, Soneium's answer is to further shift its business focus towards IP tokenization, entertainment financing, and royalty assets. The products planned by Soneium are mainly divided into three categories:

• The first category is IP Token, issued for individual creators, studios, or specific works, which can take the form of digital collectibles or tokens for fan participation, community activities, and IP business expansion.
• The second category is IP Vault, primarily aimed at entertainment investment opportunities such as music copyright funds. Investors gain corresponding rights through capital deposits, with their value related to the performance of underlying royalties or entertainment assets.
• The third category is IP Bond, which are tokenized bonds supported by entertainment businesses, providing new financing methods for concerts, music production, and other entertainment projects.

Among these, the IP Vault has already made substantial progress. On October 27, Soneium announced that it would launch the IP Vault and stablecoin ipUSD the next day, allowing eligible users to participate in a $549 million royalty fund managed by Partners Group and provided with tokenized infrastructure by Asseto. The underlying assets include over 100,000 sources of royalty income, such as The Weeknd's music works and the Discovery television content library, with an expected annual yield of 7% to 9%.

The three product categories cover different stages and types of IP assets. Compared to previous businesses centered around digital collectibles, gaming activities, and community tasks, this planning emphasizes the long-term commercial development of IP and the actual cash flow generated from royalties and entertainment revenue.

Soneium's Path to IP Assetization

The operation of a business model centered around IP depends first on the commercial value of the IP itself.

The first IP Token project chosen by Soneium is Moriusa (もりうさ), a purple rabbit created by the Japanese entertainment company STPR. As early as 2023, Moriusa began independently operating character-related businesses, launching LINE stickers, emojis, and original music, and subsequently expanding into music videos, comics, and merchandise.

Leveraging STPR's existing entertainment production capabilities and fan dissemination channels, Moriusa has gradually developed into an IP with a mature product system. In 2025, the operating team began to attempt to push Moriusa into the international Web3 market. On April 24 of that year, Moriusa issued its first NFT collection on the Ethereum mainnet, totaling 2,222 pieces, with a single issuance price of 0.05 ETH, and sold out on the day of issuance.

The series received a very enthusiastic response in the secondary market, with its floor price reaching 0.338 ETH the day after issuance. On April 27, the floor price even rose to 0.44 ETH, equivalent to 8.8 times the initial issuance price. STPR disclosed that the cumulative secondary trading volume of Moriusa NFTs exceeded 1,400 ETH within about a month of launch.

After Soneium announced its collaboration with Moriusa, the floor price of MoriusaNFT saw a significant increase. A snapshot of OpenSea on October 27 showed its floor price at about 0.48 ETH, with a 24-hour increase of approximately 43%.

If Moriusa represents an attempt to extend from character management to on-chain economics, then this year's collaboration between Soneium and the South Korean entertainment company DayOneDream is closer to traditional financial asset tokenization.

On September 28, Soneium established a partnership with DayOneDream, which involves artists and related entertainment businesses such as BTOB, LEE CHAE YEON, MEMI, and 2F, and has an IP tokenization platform called WAVIST. The next step for both parties is to bring the royalties and related revenues generated from K-pop concert businesses into Soneium and provide entertainment asset investment opportunities for eligible participants through products like Tokenized IP Bond.

This collaboration reflects another commercial logic of entertainment IP tokenization.

Concerts and music copyrights may already have relatively mature sources of income, including ticket sales, licensing, copyright fees, and commercial sponsorships. Compared to early character IPs that rely on future market enthusiasm, these assets are easier to establish financing structures around historical income, contract terms, and expected cash flows. For entertainment companies, this provides a financing option beyond traditional bank loans, equity financing, and copyright pre-sales.

Another noteworthy change is that it is establishing a unified product entry point, the Soneium Portal.

The Portal will start with primary sales of IP assets and gradually expand to fan participation, revenue distribution, and other investment services. The Startale App will take on a broader role in user asset management and ecosystem application entry. This arrangement aims to connect content discovery, financial product subscriptions, position management, and revenue distribution, reducing user switching costs between different applications.

The Old Dilemma of IP on-chain, Soneium Needs to Find New Solutions

In this strategic layout, the positioning of Soneium's native token SONEIUM will be crucial.

According to official statements, this token will be used to connect creators, IP holders, developers, fans, and investors, establishing a shared economic incentive system for different applications. However, Soneium has not disclosed the total token supply, initial circulation ratio, distribution structure, or TGE timing, and the specific value capture mechanism has not been fully disclosed. Therefore, it is still too early to speculate on the utility of the SONEIUM token, lacking practical significance.

In fact, a more worthy question to explore is whether it is feasible to build a blockchain economic ecosystem around IP.

In the past few years, the industry has undergone multiple rounds of exploration, from NFTs and music royalty tokenization to IPFi protocols. Among them, Story Protocol is one of the representative projects. Story once proposed to build an internet intellectual property infrastructure, hoping to allow content works to be used and traded more freely through on-chain registration, programmable authorization, and revenue distribution.

However, this model encountered commercial resistance during actual promotion. In June of this year, Story announced its rebranding to DATA Foundation, and its native token IP was renamed DATA, shifting its business focus from broad IP licensing to AI training data infrastructure. In the announcement of Story's transformation, the project team directly acknowledged the difficulties faced earlier.

They stated that during their business exploration in 2025, there was certain demand in areas such as music, entertainment, gaming, and creator tools. However, the development difficulties in most directions exceeded expectations. This is because companies that own high-value music, gaming, and brand IP often place great importance on controlling core intellectual property, while the open and permissionless licensing concept conflicts with the needs of companies to maintain copyright and commercial interests.

This reveals a core contradiction of IP on-chain. Blockchain emphasizes open, composable, and permissionless asset usage, but the commercial value of mature entertainment IP largely comes from copyright holders' strict management of authorization scope, brand image, partners, and derivative works.

From this perspective, Soneium's exploration this time has several noteworthy differences.

First, it attempts to start from specific entertainment assets and commercial needs, rather than relying entirely on open protocols to attract content parties to connect. Moriusa and DayOneDream correspond to real entertainment content and commercial entities, with the latter also having prior experience in completing IP bond issuance and redemption processes.

Second, Soneium clearly emphasizes in its vision document that the copyright and creative control of the IP will remain with the original rights holders, and what is issued on-chain is the participation rights related to the future economic value of the works. This arrangement is closer to the logic of traditional copyright financing and revenue rights securitization: copyright holders can obtain funding while continuing to control the development, licensing, and brand usage of the works.

Third, Soneium has a closer shareholder background and cooperative network with the entertainment industry. Sony Group has long operated in music, film, and gaming businesses, giving Soneium a certain foundation in accessing entertainment industry resources, understanding copyright business models, and establishing corporate partnerships.

However, the Sony Group background and the actual entry of Sony's IP into the Soneium ecosystem are ultimately two different matters. Sony Music, PlayStation, and film businesses have their own commercial and copyright management systems, and may not necessarily open these core assets directly to SONEIUM or Tokenized IP projects.

More importantly, the tokenization of entertainment assets still presents commercial challenges that need to be addressed.

For mature IPs, copyright holders typically already have channels for issuance, licensing, loans, and equity financing. To attract these companies to on-chain financing, actual advantages must be created in terms of funding costs, issuance efficiency, global investor reach, or revenue settlement.

For investors, entertainment assets are more complex than standardized financial assets like government bonds. Tokenization can improve asset recording and distribution efficiency, but cannot eliminate various operational risks.

At the same time, transforming fans into investors also involves two different participation logics. Fans may support works out of emotional recognition, while professional investors focus more on cash flow, valuation, and exit mechanisms. How to establish reasonable boundaries between community culture and financial investment will directly affect the market acceptance of IP Token and IP Bond.

Therefore, for Soneium, the native token issuance plan can bring new market attention, but the real value of this on-chain entertainment economic experiment will depend on whether it can establish a long-term connection between the existing commercial revenues of the entertainment industry and on-chain capital. This differentiated path, relying on existing industrial resources and involving complex financial structures, still needs to be tested by the market.

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