Published On Mar 5, 2024
CRYPTOCURRENCIES, ASTAR'S PLANS for the future, What is the Target for Astar, Big Collaborations, Pieces of Advice for CRYPTO Entrepreneurs and the Importance of Humbleness.. These are the Main topics Me and Sota talked about in the Episode 62 of the When Shift Happens Podcast.
Sota Watanabe is the founder of Astar Network, the #1 TVL Smart Contract Hub on Polkadot with Total Value Locked of $1.5B.
Sota Watanabe was born and grew up in Kawasaki-ku, Japan. He has a degree in economics from Keio University in Japan, after which he relocated to San Francisco, USA, to study and earn a certificate in the International Business Program.
While he was in San Francisco he made the most of his time in the San Francisco Bay Area by attending art and language exchange meetups and IT events in downtown San Francisco. He visited technology headquarters in SILICON VALLEY and completed an internship with Chronicled, a Silicon Valley start-up. In addition, Watanabe visited Apple, Google, and Facebook and left San Francisco to start his own company.
When Watanabe returned to JAPAN, he founded STAKE Technologies in January 2019, a technology company that provides blockchain solutions to enterprises. Stake Technologies became the first Japanese company to adopt BLOCKCHAIN acceleration, sponsored by UC Berkeley. Upon its establishment, Watanabe received an unprecedented four rounds of funding from the Web3 Foundation, which he used for further innovation. In the same year, he founded Astar, a multi-chain dApp hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), WebAssembly (WASM), and Layer2 solutions.
For Astar, his company received six grants from the WEB3 Foundation founded by Gavin Wood, the creator of ETHEREUM and POLKADOT, and claims to have raised over $30 MILLION in the past two years, including $22 million in a funding round in January.
ASTAR supports the building of DECENTRALIZED applications (dApps) with EVM and WASM smart contracts and offers dApp developers true interoperability with cross-virtual machines (XVM) and cross-consensus messaging (XCM). The unique Build2Earn model of ASTAR empowers dApp developers to get paid through the ASTR (dApp) staking mechanism for the dApps and infrastructure they build.
Thanks to his knowledge and achievements, Sota became an advisory board member of the Business Intelligence for Global Entrepreneurship at the University of Washington. In 2022, he was selected for Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia and Japan. In 2023, he was selected "100 Most Respected Japanese in the World" by Newsweek.
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• Twitter: / watanabesota
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• LinkedIn: / astar-network
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/astarnetwork?lang=en
• Website: https://astar.network/
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:42 Why Asia will Lead the Technological Advancement
07:13 Who is Sota Watanabe
12:03 The Mentality of an Entrepreneur
16:20 What does success look like for Sota Watanabe
18:30 Taxes & Happiness
23:02 Japanese Culture
25:41 Sota’s Revolutionary Project supported by Sony
34:20 Cryptocurrencies are still Small
39:53 The Importance of a Community in Crypto
44:43 Influence is Money
50:52 Sota’s Strategy for Success with his Company
1:01:46 Web3 is the best Niche for Young Entrepreneur
1:04:53 The Best Crypto Projects
1:08:15 The Power of Humbleness
1:19:09 Conclusion
#Crypto #WhenShiftHappens #Cryptopodcast #Cryptonews #Bitcoin #SotaWatanabe #Astarnetwork #Ethereum #Polkadot #Cryptoworld