Soneium, the Ethereum layer 2 backed by Sony, said on Monday 26 October 2026 that it plans to issue a native token, $SONEIUM, to sit at the centre of what it calls an onchain entertainment economy built on tokenized intellectual property. The plan was published on the Soneium Foundation’s blog, and it comes with a plain caveat: no $SONEIUM token has been issued, no supply has been given and the token generation event (TGE) will be detailed “at a later date”. We found no press release from Sony Group itself on the token.
The products around the token are more concrete. The post names a first IP token, Moriusa, a character from the Tokyo-based entertainment group Super State Holdings, and says K-pop concert royalties from DayOneDream, the company behind the group BTOB, will come onchain as “Tokenized IP Bonds”. Soneium also backs ERC-8432, a draft Ethereum standard for recording IP licences on a blockchain.
The chain that is supposed to carry all this is small. DefiLlama counted $9.38 million locked in Soneium’s DeFi apps at 00:00 UTC on 26 October, about 95% below the $203 million peak of 23 May 2025. L2BEAT puts the total value the chain secures at $20.3 million and does not rank it even at Stage 0, its lowest level of decentralisation for rollups.
What the Soneium token plan says, and what it leaves out
The post says $SONEIUM is meant to align creators, IP owners, builders, fans and investors with the growth of the Soneium economy, and calls it “an economic layer connecting the ecosystem”. That is the whole of the token’s stated purpose. The text does not say what the token would be used for in practice: paying fees, voting, staking or buying IP tokens are not mentioned.
Issuance, if it happens, would be done by the Soneium Foundation and would be “subject to applicable laws and regulatory requirements”. The post adds that plans may change and that it is not an offer or a solicitation. It gives no total supply, no allocation between team, investors and community, no airdrop and no exchange listing.
Gas on Soneium is paid in ETH today. The post says the chain is also planning an adjustment to its base gas fee “as part of its network economics”, without saying whether $SONEIUM would ever pay for gas. L2BEAT already shows the minimum base fee being changed twice this month, on 14 and 21 October, by the Soneium multisig.
One practical point follows. Because no token exists, any “SONEIUM” ticker trading on a market today, or any page asking you to claim it, is not the token described by the foundation. Fake claim pages are a common trap around token announcements, as our guide to crypto airdrop scams and fake claim sites explains.
Tokenized IP on Soneium: Moriusa, DayOneDream and the IP bonds
Tokenized IP is the core of the plan. According to Bitcoin.com News, which reported the announcement at 5:30 AM EDT on Monday, the IP can take fungible and non-fungible forms, with revenue split between rights holders automatically. The foundation’s post describes collectibles that act as “proof of fandom” and fungible tokens meant to circulate as the main currency inside one IP’s economy.
Moriusa is the only named character so far. The foundation calls it the first IP Token on Soneium and says the character, owned by Super State Holdings, may grow into merchandise, an animated short series and licensing deals. The size of the Moriusa token, its price and the date it goes on sale are not given.
The DayOneDream part is about money from live music. Royalties from K-pop concerts by artists such as BTOB are to be packaged as Tokenized IP Bonds, and a product called IP Vault is meant to give access to these royalty-backed assets. Soneium Portal is presented as the official place to discover and take part in tokenized IP, and the Startale App as the gateway to the chain.
Soneium also says more than 250 applications run on its network, across music, games, anime, film, collectibles and fan creations. That is the foundation’s own count, and it is the only place anime appears in the post: as one category of apps. No anime studio is named as a partner. Headlines that speak of anime creators signing up go further than the source does.
Yuji Kumagai, Head of Soneium Protocol, put the pitch in four words quoted by Bitcoin.com News: “Entertainment starts with creators”.
Under the heading “Onchain IP Architecture”, the post sketches the plumbing. An IP Registry gives each registered work a timestamped onchain record of origin and ownership. An IP Graph maps how works relate, from originals and derivatives to fan creations and AI-assisted content. An IP Execution Layer pays royalties, revenue splits and licence fees through smart contracts, following rules set by the IP owner. None of the three has a launch date in the post.
ERC-8432: a draft standard, not an adopted one
On 6 October Soneium said it “intends to support” ERC-8432, a proposed Ethereum standard titled “Onchain IP Asset and License Registry”. It would give IP registries a common interface for recording assets and attaching licences that software can read. The proposal was posted to the Ethereum Magicians forum on 28 September. In the pull request that would add it to Ethereum’s ERC repository, opened the same day and still open on 26 October, its status is Draft and its listed author is Jeroen Ost.
The text is careful about its own reach: “It standardizes the mechanism, not legal rights or policy.” In other words, a token on a registry would not by itself prove who owns a song or a character, or what a buyer is entitled to. That still rests on contracts and the law of each country.
The K-pop deal behind the IP bonds dates from the end of September
The DayOneDream partnership was announced in Seoul during Korea Blockchain Week 2026. The Soneium blog post on it is dated 28 September, while Music Business Worldwide, in a report dated 30 September, places the announcement on Tuesday 29 September.
DayOneDream is the company behind BTOB, Lee Chae Yeon, MEMI and 2F, and its platform is called WAVIST. According to Music Business Worldwide, WAVIST completed a full cycle of a tokenized IP bond in May 2026, from issue to redemption and burn, but neither the value nor the artists involved were disclosed. No timeline and no offering size have been given for the first assets on Soneium.
WAVIST did not start on Soneium. It previously ran its tokenized assets on Story, a rival chain built for IP. In March 2026, IP Strategy Holdings said a first round of asset sales there totalled $3.22 million, with SBI Digital Markets and Kyobo Life Insurance taking part, and that a $15 million fund was being set up. In May 2026 DayOneDream bought WITCH Company, renamed it Pledge Inc., and that company now runs WAVIST. Its products are offered outside the United States under Regulation S, with a Concert Fund as the lead product, Music Business Worldwide reported.
“K-pop is a market unlike any other, yet the way capital reaches it has barely changed,” Dylan Cho, RWA lead at DayOneDream, said, as quoted by Music Business Worldwide. Music royalties on blockchains have been tried before, with mixed results, as our guide to blockchain in the music industry and royalties sets out.
A small chain behind a big plan: Soneium TVL and L2BEAT data
Sony announced Soneium in August 2024, through Sony Block Solutions Labs, a joint venture in which Sony held 90% and Startale Labs 10%, according to Music Business Worldwide. The chain was built with Startale Group, the team behind Astar, on the OP Stack, and its mainnet went live on 14 January 2025, L2BEAT records. In February 2025 Sony Music Publishing Japan used it to give NFTs to fans of the J-pop group Sandal Telephone.
Twenty-one months after launch, the on-chain figures look like this, all checked on 26 October 2026 around 12:00 UTC:
| Measure | Value | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| DeFi TVL (latest daily point) | $9.38 million | DefiLlama, 26 Oct 2026 00:00 UTC |
| DeFi TVL peak | $203.2 million | DefiLlama, 23 May 2025 |
| Total value secured (TVS) | $20.32 million (+1.88% in 7 days) | L2BEAT, 26 Oct 2026 |
| TVS split | $7.49M canonical bridge, $11.73M externally bridged, $1.09M natively minted | L2BEAT, 26 Oct 2026 |
| Stablecoins in circulation | about $6.72 million | DefiLlama, 26 Oct 2026 |
| DEX volume | $161,000 (24h), $953,000 (7 days), $5.21M (30 days) | DefiLlama, 26 Oct 2026 |
| Activity | 2.30 user operations per second, down 50.2% in 7 days | L2BEAT, 26 Oct 2026 |
The two value figures are not in conflict. DefiLlama adds up what sits inside DeFi applications such as lending pools and exchanges. L2BEAT counts every token the chain secures, including assets that are bridged in but not deposited anywhere. The $9.38 million that The Cryptonomist cited on Monday is DefiLlama’s number, not a figure from Soneium.
The past week was flat, with DefiLlama at $9.40 million on 24 October and $9.38 million two days later. The long slide is the bigger fact: the DeFi total has lost roughly 95% since its May 2025 high, and DEX trading came to about $161,000 over the last 24 hours. Of the $6.72 million in stablecoins, about $4.46 million was minted on Soneium and about $2.26 million bridged in.
Not yet Stage 0 on L2BEAT
L2BEAT grades rollups from Stage 0 to Stage 2 according to how much users depend on the operators. Soneium’s page places it under “Others”, below Stage 0, because submitting fraud proofs is not open enough and the proof system is not fully working. A single whitelisted proposer posts the chain’s state; if it fails, withdrawals freeze.
Upgrades are controlled by a Soneium multisig needing 3 of 5 signatures and by the Optimism Security Council, 10 of 13. On 24 September 2026, upgrade 20 switched the respected dispute game from PERMISSIONED_CANNON to SUPER_PERMISSIONED, which L2BEAT describes as having no bond, no challenger and no virtual machine. On 13 October no batch was posted for 2 hours 1 minute, against a typical gap of about 8 minutes 42 seconds. The minimum base fee was changed on 14 and 21 October.
The grade is about who users must trust, not a report of lost funds: on Soneium they rely on the operators and the councils, not on code alone. Our glossary entry on what a layer 2 is covers the basics, and our page on Arbitrum and its Security Council shows how a larger chain handles the same trade-off.
What happens to ASTR?
Monday’s post does not mention ASTR, the token of Astar, Startale’s other network. In October 2024 the head of the Astar Foundation wrote on the Astar forum that Soneium “doesn’t have a native token” and set out plans to make ASTR one of its key assets, adding that nothing was final. A plan posted in November 2024 went further: Astar zkEVM would move to Soneium, and ASTR would be “the reference token in the Soneium ecosystem”.
A $SONEIUM token changes that picture. The foundation has not said whether ASTR would be kept, swapped or given a role next to the new token. No swap ratio has been published by either foundation.
European buyers and royalty-backed tokens
The IP bonds would pay holders from concert royalties. How such a token would be classified in the European Union, and who could sell it to the public there, is not addressed in the foundation’s post or in DayOneDream’s announcements. France’s AMF and Italy’s Consob have published nothing on Soneium that we could find on 26 October.
The current WAVIST products are sold outside the United States under Regulation S, and nothing in the announcements says whether EU residents will be able to buy IP bonds on Soneium. The foundation’s own wording, “subject to applicable laws and regulatory requirements”, leaves that open.
Next dates: TGE details, first IP bonds, ERC-8432
The foundation has promised TGE details “at a later date” and has given no month. Before any token appears, the measurable steps are the first DayOneDream IP bonds on Soneium, the launch of the Moriusa token with a size and a price, and whether ERC-8432 moves beyond draft status on Ethereum Magicians.
On the chain side, L2BEAT’s grade and DefiLlama’s daily TVL are public and updated continuously. On 26 October they read below Stage 0 and $9.38 million, while Kumagai says the chain now enters “a new stage”.