The Next Chapter of Astar: It’s Time to Build
Hello everyone. This is Sota, founder of Astar Network. Today is an extremely difficult day for everyone in our industry. I decided that on a day like today it would be a good time to write this article. Explaining the reasons as to why we are here and where we are headed. I joined the crypto space back in 2016 and have seen at least four extreme crashes like today. I learned two lessons from these crashes.
First, great products are built during bear markets. I still remember the early days of Axie and Avalanche. One of Axie’s founders spoke at a side event of CryptoKitties and gave me an Axie in 2017. I didn’t take it too seriously because at the time it didn’t seem like the project that was going to be big. Obviously, my guess was wrong and Axie became a massive success after the crypto winter. I also remember the early days of Avalanche. The founder gave a talk at Web3 Summit in 2019 and announced the plan for launching their mainnet. A bear market hit shortly after the conference and their ecosystem was considered a “desert”, but they didn’t give up and have created a great product and ecosystem.
Second, to survive it is extremely important to continue developing and building. Since this market is so volatile and changes quickly, there are seemingly countless reasons to quit what you are building. Our CTO says “blockchain/crypto project does not die because of the market situation, nor do they die because holders lose confidence. A project will only die when the creators stop believing in what they are making.” This is true. We have funds in USDC and USD to continue our development for 10 years. We will not stop until we succeed.
It is time to build
Again, the bear market is the best time to build and improve our product. After we launched the network on January 17th, Astar became the leading Polkadot parachain in terms of TVL, the number of on-chain transactions and the number of wallet addresses. In the coming months, we are going to focus on the most important technical updates, XCM and WASM. XCM is the core feature of Polkadot that allows Astar to communicate with Polkadot itself and other Parachains. We are very close to activating this important feature with our UI. We are also preparing for a campaign called DOT festival, to attract more DOT tokens to our ecosystem so that we can increase our TVL and usages. WASM is our next focus. We believe that Polkadot is not another EVM copy chain. We believe that WASM is the future of smart contracts. However, we also think that WASM currently doesn’t have enough toolings and use cases though this technical shift is inevitable. This is the reason why we support both WASM and EVM at the same time and make them interoperable.
Ecosystem Development
After we launched the network on January 17th, more than 20 DeFi projects and 10 NFT projects have been deployed on the mainnet within 4 months. This is still day1 for us and we envision a world where thousands of DeFi and NFT projects are built on Astar and Astar opens up the multi-chain future. As a core team, we will expand our bizdev team for our incubation program and nurture innovative use cases. What we are especially looking for are liquid staking and more DeFi primitive use cases. We are very looking forward to seeing more and more use cases on Astar Network.
About Astar
Astar Network is the #1 TVL Smart Contract Hub for WASM + EVM on Polkadot. Since winning its Parachain auction in January 2022, Astar Network has become the top Parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem in Total Value Locked and most Ethereum assets transferred over. Astar Network is the leading smart contract hub that connects the Polkadot ecosystem to Ethereum, Cosmos, and all major layer 1 blockchains. Astar Network supports dApps using multiple virtual machines — namely WASM and EVM — and offers the best technology solutions and financial incentives via its Build2Earn and Astar Incubation Program for Web3 developers to build on top of a secure, scalable, and interoperable blockchain.
The Next Chapter of Astar: It’stime to build was originally published in Astar Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
