TL;DR: With a new update or project being released almost every day, it’s clear the crypto ecosystem is constantly evolving. Astar has gone through a lot of ups and downs to reach the level it’s at today — but it’s just the beginning. Knowing what brought it here and why it was created will lead you to make better decisions when investing or simply using Astar.

In this article, we’re gonna dive into the Astar ecosystem, answer all the $ASTR related questions and even more. Prepare yourself for a history lesson and a journey to the future of Astar!

What is Astar (ASTR)?

Astar is a scaling and interoperability solution for Polkadot. Formerly known as Plasm network, Astar aims to house all Layer-2 scaling solutions and support all Layer-2 protocols on Polkadot. Interoperability is defined as the capacity of blockchains to exchange and leverage each other's data while seamlessly transferring digital assets. 

Before explaining how Astar achieves interoperability, let’s have a look at how Polkadot does it. The Polkadot network is made of two components: the Relay Chain and parachains. The Relay Chain has deliberately minimal functionality — for instance, smart contracts are not supported. Its main responsibility is to coordinate the system as a whole, including parachains.

With this design, Polkadot achieves interoperability within its own ecosystem, as parachains are able to exchange data between them quickly, without compromising on security. The goal of Astar is to expand that interoperability to other blockchains such as Cosmos and Ethereum.

What stops Dapps from achieving interoperability with other blockchains in the first place? For starters, each blockchain uses its own VM (Virtual Machine) and consensus mechanism. Implementations vary based on the founder’s philosophy regrading how a blockchain should operate.

Virtual Machines are essentially mini-computer programs that run inside your computer. If we extend the definition to blockchains, VMs are mini-dapps that run smart contracts. To dig a little deeper, blockchain VMs are built using specific programming languages. For example, Polkadot was written in WebAssembly, while Ethereum was written in Solidity.

In order for a dapp to run on a different blockchain, developers would have to rewrite the code of the dapp in that blockchain’s specific language. This is often a daunting task as it requires a ton of effort and its implementation could lead to security vulnerabilities. To overcome this obstacle, Astar is using cross-consensus message format (XCM) to bring dapps together, regardless of their native blockchain.

XCM is a generic message format, designed to be a language for communication between two systems. The format was developed by Polkadot, and it represents one of the killer features of its ecosystem. Currently, Astar supports Dapps using multiple virtual machines such as WebAssembly and EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine). Soon they plan on supporting Cosmos-native dapps.

Now that we’ve explained how Astar achieves interoperability, let’s talk about Astar’s scalability features. Scalability is defined as the amount of transactions that Astar can process per second, or throughput. Since Astar is a parachain, normally its base transaction throughput is limited to the throughput of Polkadot (around 1000 TPS).

However, Astar goes a step further by using Layer-2 solutions in order to scale its transaction throughput. As a result, Astar and any dapp deploying on its blockchain benefits from transaction speeds magnitudes of order higher than Polkadot.

Astar plans to support all Layer-2 solutions such as Plasma, Optimistic Rollups, ZK rollups and Lighting Network. Furthermore, developers building on Astar are able to access any scaling solution with just a few clicks.

The consensus mechanism that Astar uses is called Proof of Stake. This means that Astar gets its security from validators that stake $ASTR to secure the chain, which is different from Proof of Work blockchains, where miners replace the role of validators.

The concept of blockchains is not new, and Astar is one of many such networks. The idea started in 2008 with the release of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Whitepaper. This kicked off the subsequent creation of many different types of networks under the same “blockchain” terminology. Despite being similar in concept blockchains have all different architectures and use cases.

What all have in common — including Astar — is that they have to be secure. Security is the ability of a blockchain to prevent attacks and penalize malicious actors. This is usually done through their consensus algorithm and the mechanism they use to reach finality.

Finality is achieved when a block has been created and is now immutable, meaning that nobody can change the date inside. Over time many different mechanism have been designed, ranging from Proof of Work, Proof of Stake to novel ones called Proof of Spacetime. Each one hopes to achieve the best way of securing the network they are built for.

As noted before, Astar makes use of type of consensus mechanism we call “Proof of Stake” — or PoS for short. Astar is powered by the ASTR token, a central part of the ASTR ecosystem. Unlike your average blockchain, Astar has designed a Build2Earn protocol that allows developers to get a share of the revenue their dapp brings.

Developers are the heart and soul of a blockchain, which is why Astar has taken a different approach towards block rewards distribution. Instead of sending the full block reward to the validators, the Astar protocol divides the reward between the validators and dapp developers. This system encourages developers to build high value dapps, which in turn boosts the value of the ASTR token.

If you are interested in building on Astar, you will often see Shiden network associated with the project. Shiden network is Astar’s sister network, deployed on Kusama. Its role is to act as a testing environment for Polkadot where developers experiment with their blockchains before applying for a parachain slot.

The main difference between Kusama and other experiment networks is that Kusama is actually on the mainnet. Each project on Kusama is experimenting live, and has its Kusama-native token. Shiden’s native token is SDN, and has a maximum supply of 70 million SDN.

For more details about how you can earn more Astar by running a validator node at home check out our Astar Mining & Staking guide. It includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $ASTR in 2024 and beyond.

When was Astar (ASTR) created?

Astar (ASTR) was created by Sota Watanabe in 2019. Astar was initially a scaling solution for Polkadot named Plasm. The name of the project has been chosen based on the Plasma solution for Ethereum.

Plasma is a layer-2 scaling solution that seeks to increase the throughput of Ethereum transactions. In its current state, Ethereum processes around 17 transactions per second. This is because of how Ethereum works and how its consensus mechanism has been designed.

Plasma supposes that Ethereum network doesn’t need to verify all transactions. Instead, transactions can be processed off-chain, freeing nodes from the burden of verifying every transaction. Once Plasma transactions have been processed off-chain, they are settled on the Ethereum main chain.

Plasma chains are sometimes referred to as "child" chains, essentially smaller copies of the Ethereum Mainnet. A blog post from May 23, 2019, detailed how Plasm intends to add the same scalability functions to Polkadot-based blockchains. The project’s selling proposition was “scalable blockchains within minutes.”

Before moving on with explaining how Plasm works, we need to touch base with some of the elements of the Polkadot ecosystem. The Polkadot blockchain is made out of two primary components: the Relay Chain and parachains. Relay Chain has the function of securing the parachains and enabling interoperability between protocols.

Polkadot parachains can be built using Substrate, the primary blockchain SDK used by developers and the main tool used for creating Polkadot itself. Substrate is a blockchain framework which can exist independently from Polkadot. 

Substrate is currently the most popular option for projects wishing to build a Polkadot parachain. Plasm is a Substrate Runtime Module Library which allows developers to add Plasma functions to their Substrate chain.

A runtime module is simply an executable file required in order to run an app. Once Polkadot would launch, Plasm planned to become one of the first parachains, effectively helping the Polkadot infrastructure scale. Although Polkadot could initially process 1000 TPS, it was still far off from the network’s vision of processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

The idea for Plasm even received recognition from Polkadot’s co-founder Gavin Wood. One of Polkadot’s shortcomings (or feature) is that the network is limited to 100 parachains. In other words, only 100 projects can benefit from Polkadot’s security, at once.

For a project to secure a parachain slot, it needs to win an auction by locking DOT tokens. Plasm came with a clever idea in order to guarantee the same level of security for projects who were outside the Polkadot parachains.

As noted before, Plasm chains are smaller copies of the parachain. If Plasm were to win a parachain slot, other projects could connect their blockchain to the Plasm network. As a result, their network is indirectly connected to Polkadot, which qualifies Plasm as a common good chain. This proved to be a strong selling point for Plasm early on, and the term Plasma as a Service (PaaaS) was coined.

Parachain auctions are a highly competitive environment, but the benefits of using Substrate were too good to abandon building on Polkadot altogether. Plasm was selling the middle route, and they were already testing the product on Polkadot’s canary network, Kusama.

In order to benefit from the scalability and security of Polkadot x Plasm, developers need to be able to build smart contracts. This crucial feature is not supported by the Polkadot Relay Chain. Naturally, the onus is placed on parachains to enable smart contracts as the Relay Chain is solely responsible for security and interoperability.

Plasm was positioning itself as the hub for smart contracts on Polkadot. With it, came the question: what is the incentive structure for Plasm? Projects that wanted to build a Plasm chain needed to have a security mechanism, and Plasm needed to create an economic incentive for builders.

The tokenomics of the PLM token were introduced on November 17, 2019. Its main features were: staking, payment method for transaction fees and reward for Dapp creators. With the introduction of PLM, participation in the Plasm network increased.

By the end of 2019, more than 425 million PLM tokens were distributed to testnet participants. In the meantime, Plasm had grown big enough to gain the attention of Web3 Foundation, and two grants were awarded to Plasm. This was a vote of confidence from the Polkadot stewards, which ensured Plasm had enough funding to continue develop their solution.

Unlike the majority of projects who were spending their funds on aggressive marketing campaigns, Astar chose to allocate its resources towards incetivizing development on their network. Plasm was still in the testing phase, and in order to scale they realized they needed more traction.

An advantage they had early on was the support from the Web3 Foundation. In exchange, the Plasm team participated in educational events where they taught students how to create their blockchains in Substrate. It proved to be a mutually beneficial partnership, so Web3 Foundation invested more over time to have Plasm build key infrastructure for Polkadot.

Who created Astar (ASTR)?

Astar was created by Sota Watanabe, a Japanese student who had the vision of creating a scalable infrastructure for Polkadot parachains. He studied at the Keio University where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in economics. While he wasn’t learning for the University, Sota was involved in many extracurricular activities to gain more experience.

In the beginning of his college years, he spent two years at AIESEC, a leadership program for the youth. During his freshman year, Sota went abroad for the first time in India via the AIESEC program. It was there that he felt the seriousness of poverty and environmental problems for the first time, and the desire to solve these problems sprouted.

So, he started to look for technologies that can solve social problems, and stumbled upon blockchain tech in 2016. During his time at AIESEC, he leaned about sales, participated in several conferences, and was the Project Leader of Business development and later on, Product development.

In 2016, he spent 6 months as an intern at SoftBank, where worked on business development, operation and the creation of interactive programs using SDK. He then worked as an intern at Valuenex, where he was doing data analysis using EXCEL and Python.

In 2018, he joined Chronicled, which was selected as one of the world's 50 most promising blockchain startups in San Francisco. Speaking about his experience working in Silicon Valley, Sota admitted he felt that people are not only concerned with the problems within their own country, but also about what value they can provide outside of their own country.

This important realization inspired him to start his own business. At Chronicled, he was an assistant to the CEO and CMO, and learned about analysis of blockchains. The more he read about blockchain, the more he saw the opportunity of building a product that can create value.

To further his understanding of the technology, in 2019, Sota joined the Tokyo University as a blockchain researcher. As part of his research, Sota had started developing blockchain projects with his friends. Being involved in the ecosystem, Sota became the Polkadot ambassador in Tokyo and was responsible for hosting Polkadot meetups.

That year, Gavin Wood joined the Sub0 summit in Tokyo. Gavin would speak about the vision for Web3 and why Polkadot was played an important role in building that vision. Sota then started joining the Polkadot group and studied its ecosystem intensively.

His window of opportunity arrived when he started implementing scaling solutions for Polkadot. But Polkadot in itself is a scaling solution, therefore Sota came up with the idea of building a smart contract hub.

Sota’s expertise in blockchain tech landed Sota a spot as a task force member of the Japan government, where he works part-time since 2020. Currently, Sota is an advisor at a couple companies such as Detsu (marketing firm) and GMO Internet Group (IT company).

In 2019, Sota also founded Stake Technologies, which is responsible for developing the Astar protocol. The initial idea was to create a module that allows Substrate developers to customize their blockchain. The premise is that by creating a module they could also create their own blockchain. Their module was called Plasm.

Notably, in 2020, Stake Technologies was selected as one of 17 companies out of over 140 applicants for the UC Berkeley Xcelerator, a blockchain-specific acceleration program officially sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley. As part of the accelerator, the team would deepen its connections to the industrial and academic resources.

Stake Technologies joined meetups, socials, project demonstrations and university classes, where they talked about their project. With the collaboration, Astar would expand its presence and teach students worldwide how to create their own blockchains on Substrate.

Despite his lateral involvements, developing Astar into the smart contract hub for Polkadot remains Sota’s biggest mission. But he isn’t the only member that contributed to Astar.

Stake Technologies’ first CTO was Takumi Yamashita. He was the world finalist of the ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest 2016|2017 and he was selected one of the top 16 best U25 engineers by an NPO which is supported by Japanese Government in 2018.

Takumi Yamashita was replaced in 2022 by Hoon Kim, who now serves as the full-time CTO of Stake Technologies. Before joining Astar, Kim has founded STEP, a small indie game development studio.

When Kim is not coding for Astar, he is either drinking, or working on his first passion: developing games. Kim’s game studio started in 2013 with the vision of creating games for the sake of it. According to their page, the game studio is currently funded by a rev-share model, but they have plans to release more projects. Kim has joined Astar in 2022, and currently serves as the full-time CTO of the project.

Task Ohmori is the lead engineer at Stake Technologies. He is a silver medalist of the international physics olympics in 2012 and 2013.  He also has a Master at the university of Tokyo.

Aleksandr Krupenkin is the core research and development engineer at Astar. He has a Master’s degree in mechatronics and robotics at the ITMO University. Previously, Aleksandr occupied the position of software engineer at various companies such as Fiord, Whistle Technics and G-Dynamic. 

5 years before joining Astar, Aleksandr started working at Airalab, a company that leverages the Ethereum blockchain to program robots. He is in charge of building the architecture system of the Airalab platform.

As of 2022, the Astar team is made out of more than 26 members distributed globally.

How is the Astar (ASTR) token used?

The ASTR token is the native token for the Astar network. Most assets in the Astar ecosystem are denominated in ASTR, which makes it the default unit of account.

ASTR is the fuel that powers transactions and block creation on the Astar chain. We sometimes refer to it as “gas”. Its primary use case is securing the network and keeping actors aligned to the same principles.

Making a transaction on the Astar network requires a small fee in ASTR. Developers are required to make a payment in ASTR to get their Dapp on the Astar root chain, hence benefiting from the network’s security. When the developer’s ASTR balance becomes zero, his Dapp gets unregistered from the network. Therefore, Dapp developers are motivated to stack up ASTR to maintain their Dapp.

Because Astar has a quick time to finality and processes more transactions per second the gas fees quickly add up. This small fee is divided in a way that incentivizes both the Dapp creator aka operator and the network validator. The block reward is split 50-50 between them.

Astar has developed a unique system in which Dapp developers get rewarded constantly based on the value that the Dapp creates. More people using the dapp means more block rewards, which add up to a basic income for the dapp creator.

A new use case for ASTR on which Astar is currently working on is on-chain governance. In short, ASTR token holders will be able to vote for changes in the protocol. This feature is under development, and details remain scant, for now.

Since launching as Plasm, the tokenomics for Astar have remained very much the same as originally designed. The total supply of ASTR is 7 billion with a yearly inflation set at 10%.

Tokens are distributed as follows: 30% for users and early supporter, 20% for the parachain auction, 5% for the parachain auctions reserve, 10% reserved for protocol development, 5% for the DAO treasury, 5% for marketing, 10% reserved for early investors, 10% for the team, and 10% for the foundation.

Astar is currently listed on multiple exchanges. The major ones are Binance, Coinbase and Kraken. If you want to skip ahead and learn how to earn more Astar by running a validator node at home check out our Astar Mining & Staking guide. It includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $ASTR in 2022 and beyond.

Who is developing Astar (ASTR) now?

Development on Astar was started in 2019 by a team that later spun out into Stake Technologies. After validating their idea, Sota Watanabe and his team created Stake Technologies.

Stake Technologies is a company founded in 2020 that handles the development of the Astar (ASTR) blockchain and protocol. Besides handling development, Stake Technology’s role was to partner with other companies to provide the Astar Network services for enterprises.

Shortly after it was founded, Stake Technology started recruiting developers to advance its mission of scaling Polkadot. The company’s research area is specialized in decentralized scalability, privacy, and interoperability.  Furthermore, Stake Technologies is offering technical consulting services and technical support for enterprises that are implementing Web3 technology for their organization.

The entire codebase was written by Stake Technology, but open source contributors are also important. To incentivize developers, Astar created a program called Community Rewards. The performance of the project would be evaluated by the token holders, who also get a share of the rewards. According to Astar, this is a decentralized and community governed grant model.

Most of the funding early on came from the Web3 Foundation, a non-profit that stewards the growth of Polkadot projects. Stake Technologies pledged to use the funding for building Polkadot infrastructure, but some of the grants received were also used to pay open source contributors in the form of Astar’s native token.

To make full use of the Polkadot resources, Stake Technologies also joined the Substrate Builders Program. The program offers Parity support to builders, including full assistance and advice on technical & strategy fronts. At the same time, Stake Technologies has launched the Plasm Grit Partners Program.

Under the program, Stake Technologies would help partners build enterprise-grade applications for end-users. For the first round, six companies have been selected. Their profiles vary from digital consulting firms to full-fledged blockchain development teams. 

Astar’s GitHub lists 20 contributors who helped create 72 releases to the Astar code. As of 2022, there are 129 forks of the Astar GitHub repository, which means open-source contributors have actively been testing their own versions of the code.

Astar is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. The essential freedoms guaranteed are: to run the code, to study and change the source code, to redistribute copies, and to publish modified versions.

Astar has a Governance forum where the community can discuss issues such as Astar initiatives, protocol economics, lockdrop claims and general feedback. According to the team, governance will be done on-chain, but the governance module is still in the development phase.

What are the latest updates on Astar (ASTR)?

Astar in 2019

2019 was Astar’s launch year. As noted before, Astar was initially founded under the name Plasm. The project launched as a smart contract platform supporting Layer-2 solutions.

Right out of the gate, Plasm intended to build an Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM) based on the Plasma implementation on Ethereum. Furthermore, the team said it was possible to implement Lightning Network and other Layer-2 solutions to Polkadot.

The concept of Plasm was first presented that year by Sota Watanabe at DOTCon, a Polkadot conference. Until the project moved on to its next stage of development Plasm had no token. The network was on its 2rd testnet, and the team was making steady progress. However, a token would be needed later on in order to test new functionalities.

Things would change with the 3rd testnet, where Plasm introduced the Lockdrop mechanism. A Lockdrop is a modified version of an airdrop which allows participants to be early holders. The difference is that a lockdrop distributed tokens only to a select group of users. In other words, users had to show commitment to the project by locking their own tokens, with the promise of receiving their tokens back and the project’s native tokens later on.

The benefit of using this experimental mechanism was that no KYC was required and the team could be able to distribute their tokens in a fair way. For Plasm, users had to lock ETH into a smart contract to qualify for the PLM airdrop. They could even choose for how long to lock their tokens in order to receive more PLM.

The Lockdrop mechanism was still in testnet, which meant more preparations were on the way. For example, Plasm was looking for 50 validators to participate in the testnet. It wasn’t an incentivized participation, but the team promised it would allow early validators to have a secured spot for the mainnet.

At the end of the year, Plasm had launched its 3rd testnet and with it, 425 million PLM rewards have been distributed to the Lockdrop participants. By then, Plasm had managed to lay out its tokenomics plan and a staking mechanism for Dapp developers had been put in place.

Within one year, Plasm went through 3 testnets and a Lockdrop testnet. The entire work has been focused on developing the network, and it involved the participation of technical users. Plasm’s next undertaking was to further incentivize Dapp creators on Polkadot. 

Astar in 2020

On May 8, 2020, the Plasm mainnet was launched. In its current iteration, Plasm launched with four main features. The biggest feature was the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM). Its function is to host every layer-2 protocol under a unified standard.

With OVM, developers can implement different layer-2 solutions such as Plasma, State Channels and potentially rollups. As promised, integration would be done as easily as importing a library, which was the initial vision for Plasm Network. Upon launch, Plasm planned to showcase the implementation of a high throughput channel using Plasma protocol.

The second biggest feature was the launch of Dapp rewards for builders. Besides rewarding developers, Plasm went a step further to incentivize smart contract owners (called “Operators”). Plasm Network would split the block validation reward and distribute it to the Dapps that add value to the network in the form of their native PLM token.

Furthermore, Plasm Network allows the operator of a Dapp to transfer ownership to another address, which changes the recipient of the Dapp Rewards. The system created a new paradigm for trading Dapps, similar to how companies trade IPs from one to another.

Plasm’s indirect token sale called Lockdrop would enter a new phase. To increase the number of participants, Plasm Network will repeat the Lockdrop in a total of three times for the initial token distribution. This measure was carefully calculated so that no single party can claim the majority of the tokens.

At this stage, Plasm network operates on a Proof of Authority consensus, but they planned to switch to switch to a Nominated Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism after the network becomes stable. Their plan was to have full control over the network during its initial stages and make it fully decentralized as they reached specific milestones.

As the development of Plasm continues, the team moved on to a new testnet called Dusty: the equivalent of Ethereum’s Ropsten testnet. With it, the testnet PLD token was created. Users could claim their PLD tokens by locking up Ethereum Ropsten tokens in a smart contract.

At the time, the team stressed that Stake Technologies is backed by Vcs and angel investors. So they had no plans to have an ICO, which was illegal in Japan.  On the other hand, Lockdrops didn’t require KYC and helped to evenly distribute the tokens.

On December 4, Stake Technologies has received a grant from Web3 Foundation to start developing ZK-rollups on Polkadot. From that moment, Stake Technologies started to focus more on both Optimistic rollups and ZK-rollups. Development would extend into the next year and it would represent a major upgrade for Plasm Network.

Astar in 2021

2021 was the year where Astar was born. On June 29, Plasm Network rebranded to Astar to better reflect their expanded vision.

For the first two years, Plasm started out with the idea of solely implementing Layer-2 technology to Polkadot. However, the platform morphed into a Dapp hub that supports Ethereum Virtual Machine, WebAssembly, and layer2 solutions.

Following its rebrand, Astar recognized two features that are particularly important moving forward. X-VM is the name of the feature that would support both Ethereum Virtual Machine and Polkadot’s WebAssembly. In short, WebAssembly (or WASM) is a binary programming language for a virtual machine. Using 0 and 1, Wasm developers can create the most efficient dapps. 

As you can tell, WASM is a very complex language. Gavin Wood believes the future of Web3 is WebAssembly, so who are we to disagree with him? For reference, Ethereum Dapps are written in Solidity, a much more user-friendly programming language. Under these circumstances, Astar would become the first platform to enable seamless interoperability between these two different networks.

Dapp Staking is the second biggest feature on Astar, as they were the only platform in the Polkadot ecosystem that had support for it. The idea stayed the same: all smart contract developers on Astar Network can receive ASTR as a reward for value that they are creating.

In 2021, Astar launched Shiden Network (SDN) on Kusama. Essentially, Astar deployed its testnet in preparation for Polkadot’s parachain auctions. Shiden natively supports interoperability between multiple blockchains (Kusama, Ethereum, Cosmos), multiple VMs (WASM, EVM) and Layer-2 scaling solutions (Plasma, OVM and ZK rollups).

The variety of options attracted many developers to build on Shiden instead of other smart contract parachains. To ensure Shiden would be populated by developers it was time for Astar to announce a new round of incentives.

Under the guidance of Parity Technologies, Stake Network announced the Builders for Builders initiative. 10% of the total SDN supply has been reserved for the development of the protocol.  The gates were open for anyone to apply, and help set up the basis for a DAO.

In October, all projects were preparing for the much anticipated parachain auctions. Astar made no exception, as they released the crowdloan details. The total amount for the first parachain auction is 20% of the total supply, which meant 1.4 billion ASTR. Out of the total 1.4 billion ASTR, the team offered a bonus pool of 350,000,000 ASTR for the crowdloan participants.

On December 2, Astar Network had won the 3rd parachain slot on Polkadot, with block number #7927110. Astar would be ready to be onboarded to the Polkadot Relay Chain on December 18 and joins the other winners Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel, and Clover.

In total, more than 100,000 unique wallets joined the Crowdloan event spread over supported CEXs, platforms and wallets. The project raised 10,333,552 DOT ($63,861,352) for a parachain lease that lasts until October 24, 2023. Following the announcement, Astar Network planned to release the roadmap for its years ahead.

Astar in 2022

The current year has been touted the scaling year of Polkadot. Astar released a comprehensive roadmap which includes technical aspects (EVM tooling, WASM contract tooling, Astar consensus) as well as social initiatives (Incubator program, Layer-2 partnerships). According to the team, all features will first implemented on Shiden Network before making it to the Astar network.

In the month of January, Astar kicked off with the Stake2Earn Festival. The initiative would teach people how to stake on Astar and will be followed by the Dapp staking going live. After the success of the parachain auction, Astar raised $22 million from well known VCs such as Polychain, Alameda Research, and angel investors such as Dr. Gavin Wood.

The first step on Astar’s roadmap was to create a bridge with Cosmos. Thanks to Octopus Network, a recipient of the Astar grants, the team was excited to announce that Polkadot is coming to Cosmos sooner than anyone expected. But first, the Astar EVM went live, which meant developers could deploy Solidity smart contracts on Astar Network.

In February, Astar Boost Program was announced, with $100 million fund for liquidity providing, financial support, an incentive program, and much more. As more projects are lining up for the parachain auctions, Astar is staying ahead of the race by attracting as many builders to its protocol. Some of the Dapps that benefit from the funding are ArthSwap, PolkaEx, and Celer cBridge. 

The challenge in attracting talents to Polkadot is that developers have to learn to code in Substrate. For this reason, Astar launched its own incubator program, backed by Alameda Research and several other VCs.

One notable partner to offer its support for the incubator program is Microsoft. Not only did the tech giant pledge funding, but they also offered marketing support and mentorship network. With this move, Astar solidifies its position as the smart contract hub for Polkadot.

In the days following the announcement, the price of ASTR climbed to an ATH of $0.33 on April 10. The TVL on Astar also hit the milestone of $1 billion. For Astar, the TVL represents the total value of ASTR staked on their blockchain, and on the dapps that build on Astar network. As the time, $1 billion represented 45% of the total share of TVL on Polkadot.

In the following weeks, the price of ASTR crumbled to a low of $0.06, but for the team it didn’t matter. Their focus continues to be on building bridges to other networks and attracting talents to their platform.

At the end of Q1, Astar had reached several milestones from the roadmap. They implemented the testnet for ZK-Plonk, a Layer-2 protocol, and added EVM tooling.

On the side of Shiden, Astar’s sister network, its slot lease on Kusama was coming to an end on May 16. The team started to secure another slot and extend its current lease period, with more details to be released.

Astar in 2023

In 2023, Astar released the roadmap for its second iteration. This marks a major upgrade to the protocol functionalities, which extend beyond Polkadot.

On September 13th, Astar Network unveiled a strategic collaboration with Polygon Labs to introduce a ZK-powered Layer 2 chain on the Ethereum network. By harnessing the Polygon Cross-Chain Developer Kit (CDK) and the potential of zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, Astar Network aims to pioneer an L2 solution that redefines the capabilities of blockchain technology.

Sota Watanabe, the founder of Astar Network, emphasized that partnering with Polygon Labs would empower enterprises to initiate their blockchain ventures.

Astar Network's approach enables developers to utilize its platform to deploy dApps across various blockchain networks. The incorporation of zkEVM into the Astar ecosystem amplifies this multichain functionality.

The initiative aspires to act as a gateway for enterprise adoption, not just in Japan but globally.

This integration harmonizes the potential of zero-knowledge technology with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), resulting in heightened scalability without compromising Ethereum-based dApps' interoperability.

Developers can effortlessly launch existing EVM smart contracts on zkEVM with minimal modifications to the codebase. This transition reduces transaction costs, elevates the user experience, and augments the potential for widespread blockchain adoption.

In a response tweet, Astar Network explicitly clarified that their collaboration with Polygon Labs does not indicate a departure from their commitment to Polkadot, countering earlier reports suggesting otherwise.

Astar is in a constant growth cycle, and network participants like us can earn more $ASTR without too much hassle or technical knowledge, right from the comfort of our homes.

Learn how to do that in our Astar Mining & Staking guide, which includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $ASTR in 2024 and beyond.