Japan loves blockchain. From Bitcoin, the father of cryptocurrency, to modern day smart his contract his network, Japan’s changing taste in technology says a lot about the evolution of Japanese culture and the crypto industry as a whole. Unraveling Japan’s evolving appetite for blockchain in all its forms requires a short history lesson from the field’s origins to the present day.
Astar Becomes Blockchain du Jour in Japan
Late last year, the Japan Blockchain Association, the largest organization in the Pacific island nation, conducted a brief poll. We wanted to know, what was the country’s preferred blockchain for building dApps? It was a certain Astar Network.
On the surface, the results of informal research may seem surprising, but deeper research reveals the rationale behind the public’s decisions. To understand how Japan was drawn to Astar, we must first revisit how it all began in her 2008 fog.
first there was bitcoin
Given the Japanese pseudonym adopted by Bitcoin’s creator, the country has been there since day one, if not locally, in spirit. Satoshi Nakamoto’s birthplace may be further west. high, but nevertheless, by the time his influential white paper was published in late 2008, he had attracted the attention of the astute of the East.
By 2011, Bitcoin was making waves across the Pacific. One of those who chose to surf the coat of arms was a Frenchman and Japanophile named Mark Karpeles. It was he who fatefully took over the first major Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, from his Jed McCaleb, who started developing his cryptocurrency called Ripple.
The fate of Mt Gox remains an infamous story that still reverberates, but the Tokyo-based exchange was at the time responsible for putting bitcoin, and Japan as its proxy, on the map. By 2014, the exchange handled 70% of all BTC trading volume.
From making waves to changing ripples
By the time Mt. Gox shut down, the multi-crypto era had begun. BTC was still the father, but faced competition from new cryptocurrencies that promised to be faster and more feature-rich than Satoshi’s creation. One of them was his Jed McCaleb’s Ripple (XRP), which became popular in Asia, especially in Japan. To this day, the Japanese regularly trades more of his XRP than any other cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin.
By 2014, Crypto created the first memecoin in the form of Dogecoin, which also became popular in Japan. (At Devcon 5 in Osaka in 2019, Etherians flooded the stage, giving us a glimpse of the original Shiba Inu that inspired the dog meme.) But Japan prefers cats to dogs, Predictably, it’s the meme coin that fell the hardest in 2014. The first Nekocoin was Monacoin.
Ethereum era
By 2015, cryptocurrencies had evolved again, this time to smart contract networks that offered more than just novelty. At that time, Ethereum was launched, and its ancestors have launched a series of popular blockchain projects in Japan to this day.
The original team of Ethereum co-founders included Polkadot founder Gavin Wood and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson (other co-founders include ConsenSys’ Founders Joe Rubin, Anthony Di Iorio, Mihai Alicie, Jeffrey Wilke, and Amir Chetrit have largely disappeared from the crypto scene).
Hoskinson has been said to have always been a bit of a nuisance in the community and was kicked out early on due to ideological disagreements. I have. His contributions are highly technical. For example, he was responsible for the creation of his paper Yellow and the design of his Solidity, the programming language that underpins most of his contracts today.
Vitalik and Gav, as they are affectionately called, have never publicly shared their disagreements. Something happened between the two. Wood said in early 2016 that he left Ethereum Core his team and published a farewell post that essentially made no mention of his work at Vitalik.
Cardano Kickstarts the After-Ether Era
In 2021, when the Cardano network finally went on-stream, Chinese and Japanese investors jumped on the hype and started buying ADA in bulk. It was positioned as the eastern answer to Vitalik’s creation. In Japan, however, it was Cardano that sparked the fire, aided by a domestic exchange listing. This is by no means a feat in a post-Gox exchange-regulated country.
A project that can list its tokens on one of the Japanese exchanges is a good chance to find a place in the country’s heart. Return to Astar Network. With EVM and WASM compatibility, Astar effectively ties the original Ethereum to Polkadot, one of his many successors touted as its “killer.”
Having Sota Watanabe, one of Japan’s most famous cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, lead the project does not hurt Astar’s domestic prospects either. Astar’s founders have been working closely with government officials on the adoption of web3 and have co-authored a white paper on the topic published by the government. These factors set off a perfect storm for Astar to be incorporated into Japanese crypto culture and become the country’s unofficial Layer 1 leader.
Blockchain rails don’t stand still, but Japan is still synonymous with crypto even as the technology evolves. That is exactly what you would expect from the world’s third largest economy.
Image by David Peterson from Pixabay
