The DApp Hub Of Polkadot

Unbiased notes of Dotsama Ecosystem

In collaboration with WagMedia and PolkaHaus

Intro

In Part 1 i went ahead and gave general information of the project, DApp staking, useful links for the Dotsama community and all the core features of Astar. In Part 2, we dive into the team,backers and tokenomics. This is crucial for any crypto project investment and a big part of a fundamental analysis. Im not here to shill and certainly would not not advise anyone to buy or not a specific token, at the end of the day this is intended to provide quality information, with simple structure to have it (you and me) somewhere saved for anytime someone asks: What is Astar? Is the team any good?

Backers/VC's

The first thing we have to adress is that the project is founded in 2019 by Japanese Sota Watanabe (26 years old!) and the company behind Astar is Stake Technologies.

Stake Technologies is a company that makes core decentralized protocols to make Web3.0 happen

Stake Technologies has raised a total of $12.4M in funding over 3 rounds. (2020-2021). One of the investors that caught my eye was Nobuyuki Idei who is Founder and CEO of Quantum Leaps Corporation & Former Chairman and Group CEO of Sony .Many of the Astar team members are also spoted in the above company.

Worth noting, that Commonwealth Labs, Webb Technologies, and Stake Technologies formed a partnership to support Astar Network. Commonwealth is an all-in-one platform for on-chain communities to discuss, vote, and fund projects together. Partners are known crypto-projects like Near, Uniswap,stafi, Edgeware,HydraDX.

Commonwealth is US based and will help Astar in western markets, while the team from Singapore will continue to expoand in the East. Assitionaly Commonwealth will provide governance interface. That interface and experience, will be used to deploy on-chain governance to Astar in the near future.

For Astar, it is very important to have a strong presence in the US given that we have already created a strong ecosystem mainly in Asia and the EU. This cooperation is strategically important and I think this will be a great move that will create a compound effect, - Sota Watanabe, Stake Technologies’ CEO.

Astar Network has made 2 investments. Their most recent was on Nov 11, 2021, when Subsquid raised $3.8M, and also invested in DAOlaunch.

But who is backing Astar?

In 2021, according to this article Binance Labs as the lead, alongside HashKey, LongHash, Digital Finance Group, and PAKA Ventures rased $2.4mil to support the team.

In 2022, they raised another $22 mil in strategic round. Participants include Polychain, Alameda Research, Alchemy Ventures, Animal Ventures, Crypto.com Capital, Digital Finance Group, GSR, ROK Capital, Scytale Ventures, Vessel, Injective Protocol, and angel investors including Dr. Gavin Wood, Richard Ma, Keisuke Honda, and some executives from Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies. Richard Ma is CEO of Quantstamp (auditing crypto project) Keisuke Honda is ex footballer and star in Japan, played for International Japan Team and also for Roma,Milan and others. Alongside Binance Labs, exchanges like Huobi, OKEx and Coincheck are also invested in Astar so its expected the token to be traded on all of those.

Team

The team is not visible in the main page but in a recent AMA its said that the website is due to overhaul in order to have the people working for Astar in the front page. Seems that they have 26 employees(6 at marketing and 15-20 tech). 6 in linkedin and 13 in github. 40 ambassadors from all over the world. Due to Japan crypto regulations, team is based in Singapore and they never have used a marketing agency. (hmm)

The one you have to pay attention is Sota Watanabe. With 5 years in blockchain space, is CEO at Stake Technologies Pte Ltd and a founder of Astar Network, he is a director at Japan Blockchain Association and a task force member of Trusted Web Council led by the Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan.

" I wanted to join the movement from the begining"

Other notable findings:

• Maarten Henskens

VP of Growth for astar ecosystem Ex bifrost finance for a year, substrate developer

• Hoon Kim

CTO at Stake Technologies CEO of Team STEP (indie game development studio)

• Aleksandr Krupenkin

Research and development engineer Robotics/iot developer Airalab (open source client in Robonomics network)

• Hyungsuk Kang ( interesting here)

co founder of Standard protocol under contract with Tendermint Polkadot head ambassador of east asia Lead soft engineer at stake Software engineer at terraform labs Blockchain research engineer at samsung for couple months and more

• Yoshinobu shijo

Blockchain Specialist and Evangelist. Crypto Economist / Co-Founder of Galleon / Ph.D Student studying Blockchain&IoT Core dev at stake

• Mario vukelic

Worked at Ericsson for 6 years, now a dev in astar

• Chris Malize

Ambassador in astar ex ambassador in subquery,anrkey,seascape, stafi,celsius,wanchain,reef

• Jake Hemmerle

EX web 3 foundation, Technical education intern Now astar substrate runtime developer

• Yakub Sheikh

ex robonomics CMO, head of ecosystem success

Tokenomics

Here is an overview of token distribution:

And here is what went where:

Unfortunately havent managed to find a vesting schedule of the tokens. Keep in mind that in order to have a higher conviction of a project and more value to be expected, there should be over 50% tokens released. All i can say for now is that if someone has ASTR tokens, for sure have to stake them in Astar Dapp in order to fight the inflation.

Token Utility:

1. DApp staking. Check Part 1 of the review.

2. NPoS Staking. The typical staking being Validator or Collator. The amount of $ASTR someone must have to run a collator is 3.2mil tokens at the moment.

3. Transactions

4. On-Chain Governance

5. Layer2 : Layer2 Dapp developers must make a deposit on their layer1 smart contract and create layer2 applications.

Partnerships And Links

Stake Technologies has been working with Microsoft Japan under the Microsoft for Startups program. The collaboration with Microsoft Japan will provide a wide range of marketing and infrastructure support to ecosystem projects and developers on Astar Network.

According to parachain.info, there are also partnerships with other Dotsama projects, but personally i cant confirm anything.

• Standard Protocol joins Astar's Builders Program: here
• NFTYLabs joins Astar's Builders Program: here
• OnFinality partners with Astar
• Subscan joins Builders Program
• Oraichain partnership
• API3 partnership
• ChainLink collaboration
• Bondly partnership

Final Thoughts

With Astar being one of the oldest, first to win an auction parachains and part of the major (in my mind) trio of L1 Polkdadot Blockchains ( the others are Acala and Moonbeam), the expectations are high. Tech heavy with low amount of hype and marketing, it might become a "tech only" token delivering low amounts of market share. Long term vision should be applied from both investors and the team. Exploring Defi (which they are), means more TVL, means more Dapps in their ecosystem, means more users, means more value.

Some say 2022 is the year of Dotsama. If this happens, Astar will thrive.

If you like the content, here is my Twitter handle @andreas_seppy