From Bitcoin to Astar: Following Japan’s love affair with blockchain

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Japan loves blockchain. From the father of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, to modern smart contract networks, Japan’s changing tech tastes speak volumes about the country’s culture and the evolution of the crypto industry as a whole. Unpacking Japan’s evolving appetite for blockchain in all its forms requires a short history lesson covering the industry’s origins to the present day.

Astar Becomes Japans Blockchain of the Day

Late last year, the Japan Blockchain Association, the largest such organization in the Pacific island country, conducted a simple survey. What was, he wanted to know, the nation’s preferred blockchain for building dApps? The answer, seeing Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche from afar, was Astar Network, the Polkadot-affiliated ecosystem for EVM and WASM smart contracts.

At first glance, the results of the informal inquiry may seem surprising, but closer examination reveals the rationale for the public decision. Understanding how Japan turned to Astar first requires retracing how it all began in the mists of 2008.

In the beginning there was Bitcoin

Given the Japanese pseudonym adopted by the creator of Bitcoins, the country has been there since day one, in spirit if not in place. Chances are Satoshi Nakamoto hails from further West, but regardless, by the time his seminal white paper was published in late 2008, he had caught the eye of the discerning eyes of the Is.

In 2011 Bitcoin was making waves across the Pacific. One of those who chose to surf this ridge was a Frenchman and Japanophile by the name of Mark Karpeles. It was he who fatally took over Mt. Gox, the first major bitcoin exchange, from Jed McCaleb, around the same time the latter began developing a cryptocurrency called Ripple.

While the fate of Mt. Gox remains an ignominious story that still resonates to this day, the Tokyo-based exchange was an unbridled success at the time, responsible for putting Bitcoin on the map and vicariously Japan. In 2014, the exchange handled 70% of all BTC trading volume.

To make waves with changing ripples

By the time Mt. Gox was liquidated, the multi-crypto era had begun. BTC was still the daddy, but it now faced competition from newer cryptos that promised to be faster and more feature-rich than Satoshis’ creation. One of them was Jed McCalebs Ripple (XRP), which became a favorite in Asia, Japan in particular. To date, the Japanese regularly trade more XRP than any other included crypto bitcoin.

In 2014, the crypto spawned its first memecoin in the form of dogecoin, and it too found favor in Japan. (At Devcon 5 in Osaka in 2019, ethereals rushed to the stage to catch a glimpse of the original Shiba Inu dog that inspired the doge meme.) More than dogs, however, Japan loves cats and, as one might Expectedly, the memecoin that fell the hardest in 2014 was monacoin, the first cat coin.

The Age of Ethereum

By 2015, crypto had moved on again, this time to smart contract networks that offered more than just novelty. This is when Ethereum was launched, with its ancestors starting a series of blockchain projects that are popular in Japan to this day.

The original team of Ethereum co-founders included Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot, and Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano (other co-founders included Joe Lubin, founder of ConsenSys, and Anthony Di Iorio, Mihai Alisie , Jeffrey Wilcke, and Amir Chetrit, who largely fell from the crypto scene).

Hoskinson has always been a bit of a black sheep in this community and was reportedly kicked out early on due to ideological disagreements. Gavin Wood, on the other hand, has a very strong claim as one of the founding fathers of Ethereum. His contribution is highly technical, for example he was the person responsible for the creation of the Yellow Paper and the design of Solidity, the programming language that underpins most smart contracts today.

Although Vitalik and Gav, as they are affectionately known, have never really aired their disagreements in public, it’s clear that something happened between the two. Wood left the Ethereum core team in early 2016, posting a farewell post with no mention of his work with Vitalik.

Cardano kicks off post-Eth

In 2021, as the Cardanos network finally went live, Chinese and Japanese investors picked up the hype and started buying ADA in droves. Everyone was looking for the next Ethereum, with Neo also positioning itself as Easts answer to the creation of Vitaliks. In Japan, however, it was Cardano that had caught fire, aided by a listing on the domestic exchange, which is no small feat in a country with such tightly regulated exchanges after Gox.

Any project that can get its token listed on one of the Japanese exchanges has a good chance of finding a place in the hearts of nations. Which brings us back to Astar Network. With its EVM and WASM compatibility, Astar effectively links the original Ethereum to one of the many successors touted as its Polkadot killer.

It also didn’t hurt Astars’ domestic prospects that the project was led by Sota Watanabe, one of Japan’s best-known crypto entrepreneurs. The Astars founder has worked closely with government officials to advance Web3 adoption and co-authored a white paper on the subject which was published by the government. These factors created the perfect storm for Astar to fit into Japan’s crypto culture and become the country’s unofficial Layer 1 leader.

The blockchain rails keep moving, but even as the technology evolves, Japan remains synonymous with crypto. It’s nothing less than you’d expect from the world’s third-largest economy.

Image by David Peterson from Pixabay

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