Soneium has adopted OP Enterprise’s fully managed service to support its tokenized intellectual property plans, with OP Labs providing chain operations under a 99.9% monthly uptime target. Summary OP Labs will support Soneium’s sequencer, nodes, monitoring, upgrades, and incident response. The agreement includes a 99.9% monthly uptime target and round-the-clock on-call incident support. Soneium retains chain ownership and control over its roadmap, technology and product decisions. The network’s entertainment work already includes licensed anime collectibles and consumer-facing blockchain applications. Soneium announced the agreement in a Sept. 30 statement, saying it had joined OP Enterprise’s fully managed tier while keeping its own engineers involved in developing the chain. The announcement took place at Soneium’s event during Korea Blockchain Week in Seoul, South Korea. Under the arrangement, OP Labs, the core development team behind Optimism and the OP Stack, will support the infrastructure used to operate Soneium. According to the statement, the service covers the sequencer, node infrastructure, monitoring, software upgrades, and incident response, with the operating commitments set out in a service-level agreement. Soneium keeps product control while OP Labs supports operations With OP Labs supporting chain operations, Soneium’s engineering team will continue working on the network alongside the service provider, the announcement said. Soneium will retain ownership of the chain and authority over its roadmap and product decisions. The agreement includes a monthly uptime target of 99.9%, backed by 24/7 on-call incident response, according to the statement. The uptime figure is a contractual target for the service rather than a reported measure of the network’s past performance. For Soneium’s protocol team, the arrangement is intended to support development of its entertainment products, beginning with tokenized intellectual property, or IP. “We keep shaping Soneium’s technology ourselves. OP Enterprise’s support on chain operations helps us move faster on Onchain Entertainment, starting with Tokenized IP.” Yuji Kumagai, head of Soneium Protocol From the infrastructure provider’s side, OP Labs CEO Jing Wang described the service as support for a team already building on its technology. In the announcement, Wang said OP Enterprise would keep operations “running smoothly” so Soneium’s developers could continue delivering products. According to OP Labs’ description of the offering, OP Enterprise provides deployment, operations and dedicated support for organizations using the OP Stack. Soneium already runs on that framework, the statement said. Tokenized IP builds on earlier licensed anime collectibles Soneium’s entertainment focus has already produced blockchain collectibles tied to licensed Japanese content. In March 2025, crypto.news reported that YOAKE and OpenSea had introduced licensed anime NFTs on the network based on “The Seven Deadly Sins.” According to the announcement covered in that report, the collection drew on the film “The Seven Deadly Sins: Cursed by Light” and was available exclusively through OpenSea. Minting opened at 5 a.m. GMT on March 25, with each NFT priced at 0.002 ETH and an unlimited mint available for 72 hours. The collection featured a scene showing the characters Meliodas and Zeldris sharing a vow with their chalices, the report said. Startale supported YOAKE’s acquisition of the intellectual property used for the release. At the time, YOAKE entertainment executive Sota Moriyama said the company planned further anime-themed collectibles to encourage fan participation in blockchain applications. The earlier release offered digital collectibles linked to an existing entertainment property; the Sept. 30 announcement identifies tokenized IP as the starting point for Soneium’s current development focus. Sony funding and privacy tools support Soneium’s applications Sony Ventures announced a $13 million investment in Startale Group through the Sony Innovation Fund on Jan. 29, 2026, according to earlier coverage of the funding statement. The investment followed a $3.5 million seed round in 2023 involving Sony Network Communications and a $3.5 million extension in 2024 involving UOB Venture Management and Samsung Next. The January report put Startale’s total disclosed funding at $20 million at that time. Startale, which originated from the Astar Foundation, serves as a technical infrastructure provider for Soneium, according to the report. Sony Block Solutions Labs and Startale co-developed the Ethereum layer-2 network using Optimism’s OP Stack. In its January announcement, Startale said Soneium had processed more than 500 million transactions and supported over 250 live decentralized applications since its January 2025 mainnet launch. Those figures describe the network’s reported activity at the time of the funding announcement. On April 28, Startale announced plans to add optional privacy to its consumer app through Privacy Boost, developed by Sunnyside Labs. According to the partnership report, the integration would let users shield assets, make private transfers, and use privacy-preserving payment functions while retaining control of their wallet keys. The companies said the system combined zero-knowledge proofs with trusted execution environments and supported selective auditing for compliance checks. Their stated performance targets included proof generation below 500 milliseconds and throughput above 1,800 transactions per second. For the Startale App, the announced integration covered asset management, payments, mini apps and ecosystem rewards. The companies also described payment functions intended to support future crypto card use. Sony Bank’s separate stablecoin plan targets U.S. customers For American consumers, Sony’s entertainment-related digital asset work also includes a separate banking initiative. A Dec. 1, 2025 report detailed Sony Bank’s U.S. stablecoin plans, citing Nikkei’s reporting on a proposed dollar-pegged token for customers in the United States. According to that report, Sony Bank planned a stablecoin pegged one-to-one to the dollar for payments and settlement in its gaming and anime operations, with issuance contemplated as early as fiscal 2026. Nikkei reported that the token could provide an alternative to credit cards for subscriptions and reduce fees paid to card issuers. The December coverage also reported that Sony had applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in October 2025 for a national crypto bank charter through Connectia Trust. In a Nov. 6 letter opposing the application, the Independent Community Bankers of America argued that the proposed structure sought the benefits of a national bank charter without the full requirements imposed on banks. The association also warned that approval could weaken the separation between banking and commerce and disadvantage community banks.
